Thank you! turns out the Model Database has an initial size of 1MB (data) and 4mb (log) so when our Server is rebooted once a month I'm thinking that the TEMPDB is recreated with these tiny settings.. I'll change in both places.

Another related question.. last night I had a problem accessing one of the databases on this production server and the errors in the log were this:

SQL Server has encountered 931 occurrence(s) of IO requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [E:\MYDB_Data.MDF] in database [MyDB] (7). The OS file handle is 0x00000390. The offset of the latest long IO is: 0x0000073aa66000

Transaction (Process ID 10) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

followed by this:

Error: 9002, Severity: 17, State: 6

The log file for database 'tempdb' is full. Back up the transaction log for the database to free up some log space..

Do you think the 2 are related????