The "Right" answer is apparently a little misleading here... According to BOL, there would be entries in the DMV, they would just have all counters set to 0.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188755.aspx

Effectively, this would mean that the DMV DOES tell you something - it gives you a list of all the indexes used since the database itself was last shut down or detached.

But then maybe it's just unclear in the BOL article, and the rows really are all removed every time the service is started. Does anyone know? (I don't have 2005 handy to test...)

Thanks,

Tao