So, the long and short of it is that TDE did indeed cause increased overhead and the server was not sized correctly to handle the I/O load.

We also had a concurrent issue with the application that was connecting to the database failing on it's own do to not having the FQDN listed in it's connection options (major source of pain with the system but not apparent at the time).

I was grasping at straws to try to figure out why the users where getting random disconnects related to the SQL when it seems that it was the App server that was causing a lot of issues and bombing out the application.

So now after adding the FQDN to the connection to the app server cluster things seem to be stabalizing (crosses fingers)

Thanks for the advice.

Sorry the previous posts were not as clear as they could be.