I believe that the repo gets verified automatically as a daily thing, but our IT department was verifying it hourly. They have stopped.

I think that the hourly verification was put in to try to diagnose some problems that were actually or suspected to be related to WMI corruption.

Even daily verification is going to cause problems, they are just less likely to be noticed, until they get to the 30+ minutes level.

It sure sounded like they had a scheduled task to run it manually every hour. "Until then our IT department has promised to stop running the /verifyrepository command every hour, which should avoid the worst symptoms."