Not had a chance to do a full investigation on this, however I did have a situation the other day where, despite me killing off all query connections and all connected Object Explorer windows, I still found that the 2008 Management Studio would ping one of my servers every three minutes or so. This only transpired because it was using an old cached Sql Server DB Principal password (I’d just changed it) and ChangeDirector was constantly wibbling about it.

Killing off MS altogether stopped the issue dead in its tracks. If I get a chance to I might go back to finding out what the real story was, but a little puzzler it was at the time.

Sql Server 2008 Build 10.0.1600.22 (RTM)