I found a work around hack. Not entirely proud of this, but I created a div next to my drop down, with a display:none style, and then set it up with the following jquery:
ctl.change(function (e)
{
var ddl = $(this);
ddl.next().tooltip(
{
content: "...custom content...",
position:
{
of: ddl
}
}).tooltip("open");
});
ctl.blur(function (e)
{
var ddl = $(this);
ddl.next().tooltip("close");
});
Not entirely sure why this works and the other doesn't. However I did find that if I put a title on the select and just initialize the tooltip using $(document).tooltip, the tooltip plugin seems to interfere with the selects drop down list, so this approach also resolves that issue.