Quote Originally Posted by Soulfire View Post
Um...no. My retainers still hang around without me having to do a thing.

I know you can leave them in the wards and talk to them now and then and they'll stay, but a few days back I found the retainers of an alternate character still in the wards, and I couldn't even remember how long it had been since I had spoken to them. One of them had nothing up but a stack priced at the maximum limit.

I brought up the issue in linkshell chat and was told something about a retainer being left alone for some duration between two to three weeks and still remaining in the wards.

Searches also seem to attest to this timer not functioning.
He meant that it used to have a time limit, but people keep bitch about that also and they removed it later.