I've made some progress since reading Cidrei's post...I found BuffButton2 which was nice
I'll have to look at the parent frame for the buff buttons more closely--i tried manipulating CT_BuffFrame, but that is the frame for the style of buff buttons that I don't use (the ones that stack vertically on the right). I use the ones that are horizontal at the top of the UI. I'll look at the parent frame of one of the buttons and see if that offers any clues. I've not used xml code at all before, but perhaps a bit of searching in the .xml file will tell me what i'm looking for as well.
On the issue of the tooltip, I'm probably calling it the wrong thing. The frame I want to control is the one that usually appears in a static position in the LR corner during any mouse-over events. Not the one you get, for example, by hovering over an inventory item that is always near the cursor. I use CT_MOD to position this thing i'm calling a tooltip in it's alternate spot at the top of the screen, in the center. It obscures my Boss Panel in that postion and is too big anyway.
One other issue I can't get a handle on is after moving around a couple buff buttons, they now don't go away when the buff expires. It takes another one to overwrite it before it will change. Did using the 'Hide' or 'Show' button in VZG alter it's normal behavior somehow? I'm assuming that it's supposed to hide itself once that buff expires, but I'm wondering if a 'Show' might be overriding it. Any way to get it back to normal?
Thanks!
[edit] One other thing i'd like to know how to do (if it's possible) is to force Visor to release it's hold of an element to let it go back to it's default (i.e. pre-visor) condition. The only way I can get it done now is to disable the visor addon.