I have a 3rd party app that I suspect is behaving badly (actually, I'm about 99.9% sure it is). When I save changes to the database, it executes what should be (as near as I can tell) about 20 SQL ...

The move from Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to 2005 was a big leap with many new functionalities and features introduced. The concept of DDL Triggers was one such new feature.