Fair enough. From what I recall, the traffic was going to telemetry servers not time sync. Next time I play with Windows I'll holdon to the capture logs for proof.

I think the other side effect from all those regedit hacks was issues with Windows updates. In the end, my machine got stuck at installing October patches, rebooting then failing at 99% applying the patch, rebooting again, rolling back the patch, rebooting, trying to install the patch again. The non-stop CPU usage and reboots made me quit Windows for awhile.