I have placed some screen shots
HERE. They take up a bit of Mark's realestate so let me know after you have them and I will clear them out. Hopefully they will illustrate what I am complaining about.
As I mentioned, this behavior no longer exists when working in pure model space - only within an unlocked floating modelspace viewport if that is any clue to interrupting the offending events.
One thing of note, the objects and their labels are of course dynamically linked. Although there may be several elements composing the label it is only one entity with an attachment point defined in the style. The objects themselves are also one entity with several individual parts - kind of like supercharged dynamic blocks - with their own defined attachment. The labels can be handled either with or seperately from their object depending on the action being taken.
If you have access to or have seen Revit, Civil 3D is doing very similar things with land data as Revit does with architectural. The Toolspace interface is also quite similar to Revit.