I'm thinking of setting the timeout on all my tooltips in a WinForms application to infinity (or an extremely large value). The motivation is that it's annoying for the user if the tooltip disappears while I'm still reading it, without providing any extra value whatsoever as far as I can tell.

Normally I wouldn't ask something like this on StackOverflow, but the overwhelming majority of all software sets timeouts on tooltips, so it makes me wonder whether perhaps there is some important consideration I'm missing? Or is this just an old convention that nobody gives further thought to?

If you would hate infinite timeout as opposed to a short timeout, please explain why.

(If you just think tooltips are a bad idea altogether then that's a separate consideration; this question is specifically about the infinite timeout.)