Word 2013 connecting to office online sites without any documents opened

Hey everyone, 

One of our customers is runing a Windows Server 2012 Remotedesktop Server onPromise with an installed Office 2013 Suite. 
Another Application running is connected to an externally hosted DB Server. 

The customer called earlier that the programm using the external database is working very slow and is getting timeouts.
I tried to figure out what was using up all the traffic and found it was winword.exe connectinng to several microsoft sites : 

68.232.34.200
blu.officetestfive1.microsoft.com
65.52.129.119

After the user closed word and logged of and on again everything was fine again. 

The thing is that there are no configured online services for word and the user didn't even have a word document open, it was just the startup screen of word where you can chosse templates etc. 

I am trying to figure out 

1) why is word even trying to connect office online
2) how can I stop this from happening - the traffic used up about 300kb/s upstream

I already checked the Word Startup Folder from that user, but it was empty. 

any one seen this beahviour before ? 

Florian