Spark polls Spark/spark.properties constantly

Our users run Spark 2.5.2 on Windows XP SP2. Spark creates a Spark/ folder in their home directory which contains a spark.properties file. That is find. But Spark polls this file constantly, we see an enourmous amount of network traffic that is just several dozen clients constantly polling this file. Requests are SMB Trans2 QUERY_PATH_INFO requests, like it is constantly checking the last modified time of the time?? Is there a known reason this happens? We’d try Spark 2.5.8 / 2.6.0 but those don’t run at all for users with roaming profiles (see other thread).