MSSQL Enterprise Manager makes 1000's of Port 445 connections to MSSQL Server

I've got two Windows XP systems that my programmers use to connect to a Microsoft SQL2000 Server via Enterprise Manager. Immediately upon connecting to the SQL server via Enterprise Manager, the host "establishes" one connection to the SQL server on port 445. Then begins excessively making new port 445 "time_wait" status connections (looking though netstat -an)  that mount into the 100's per minute. As soon as I close Enterprise Manager it stops.  I am using version 8.0 - MSSQL 2000
client only, a sql server instance is not installed on this host machine.
As a note, connecting via SQL Query Analyzer does not cause this flood of
connections.
I've gone through:
1. Re-installed SQL Enterprise Manager - same issue
2. Connected to two other SQL servers and discovered that it has the
same issue with another server.
3. We've installed enterprise manager on a new windows 2003 server and
it starts creating these new time_wait connections immediately.
4. Two other XP machines in our group do successfully connect to these
same sql servers without this flood issue.
5. I disabled named pipes in the SQL Client Network Utility
and that doesn't make a difference.

Have you seen this issue before?