So I am just recently having this issue and I cannot figure out what might be wrong. When I hover my mouse over a parameter on any node, I do not have a popup box with the hint that tells me what the parameter name is and its description. Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I have tried looking through my preferences and even deleted my houdini preferences file and generated a brand new one. The issue still remains.

So after many painstaking hours, I've discovered that the fix for this is a checkbox. On the Main Task Bar, under Help, there's a checkbox for "Tooltip Help". Somehow it got unchecked for some reason. But, after checking it back on, the help tip appears now when hovering over parameters on nodes.