How are you applying the Appearance to the row? Usually, the best and most efficient way to apply any row-level settings like a tooltip or an appearance is to use the InitializeRow event.
If that's not helpful, then I recommend you make sure you get the latest Hot Fix. This might be a bug that has already been fixed.
If that doesn't help, then you should Submit an incident to Infragistics Developer Support an, if possible, include a small sample project demonstrating the problem so they can check it out.
Here is some code I use to apply an icon and tooltip to the cells
cell.ToolTipText = "sample text";
cell.Appearance.Image = Properties.Resources.Icon1.ToBitmap();
I use it to display notes related to some entities, so anytime the user wants to add a note, I update the icon if the type of note changes, and the tooltip also changes with the text of the latest note.