I don't know if the DBG listener is part of PhpED or part of the debugger, so this feature request might be in the wrong form.

Anyway, I really wish there was an option to disable the DBG listener from being displayed in the system tray. The reason is simply XP continuously polls applications in the system tray and it often results in a hard drive access every few seconds. This can be costly on a SSD drive because of the finite writes available. If you could make an option to disable it from appearing in the tray that would be excellent.

Polling the harddrives under XP is not caused by icons in the system tray.
Try to run perfmon.exe and you'll see that it constantly monitors system performance. You'll see 2 counters: average disk queue length and processor time. The first one causes harddrive access each ~ 2 seconds.
You'll find quite a long discussions on microsoft.com site related to this problem.