On our development sql server, executing any query containing more than approximately 700 characters stalls for about 10 seconds and then reports the following error:

Msg 121, Level 20, State 0, Line 0
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The semaphore timeout period has expired.)

for example, this query

select * from FooTable where id = ' (.. and then 700 spaces ..) '

fails fails with the timeout error while this one

select * from FooTable where id = ' (.. and then 600 spaces ..) '

fails with the expected Msg 8169, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Conversion failed when converting from a character string to uniqueidentifier. - immediately.

Indeed, throwing any query, including random garbage at our dev sql server exhibits this behaviour, while any other sql server I have available acts as expected, so I would think that the query never actually gets to parsing on the server.

I'm at a loss here - any hints?