Blogs were buzzing this week with reports that Windows users who thought they had automatic updates set to either not install or get permission before installing nonetheless had their machines patched and rebooted.
Friday afternoon, the company posted a response to its Web site saying no changes were made to the automatic update mechanism nor did any recent updates change AU settings. The company is looking into whether customers might have actually had their settings changed by Microsoft Office or Windows OneCare, two programs that do have mechanisms that will change a computer's automatic update preference settings.
"We have received some logs from customers, and have so far been able to determine that their AU settings were not changed by any changes to the AU client itself and also not changed by any updates installed by AU," program manager Nate Clinton said on Microsoft's Web site. "We are still looking into this to see if another application is making this change during setup with user consent, or if this issue is related to something else. We are continuing the investigation, and as I have more information I will update this post."
The company is asking anyone experiencing an issue to contact its customer support so that it can get more information.
Meanwhile, in a separate posting, Clinton acknowledged that some people are having trouble manually installing updates after moving to the latest version of Windows Update.
The issues Friday follow an earlier outcry over the discovery that the Windows Update utility updates itself regardless of whether automatic updates are turned on.
Microsoft sought today to downplay the recent, but unpublicized, automatic update of system files on Windows XP and Vista machines as "normal behavior." ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has been writing the last two days about a "stealth" update that occurred on his and other machines in late August, even though those machines are set to not install automatic updates. "I just don't like the idea of having updates foisted upon systems without being aware that they are coming in and having the option to postpone them," he wrote.
A Microsoft spokesperson said, "Windows Update automatically updates itself from time to time to ensure that it is running the most current technology, so that it can check for updates and notify customers that new updates are available."
"The point of this explanation is not to suggest that we were as transparent as we could have been; to the contrary, people have told us that we should have been clearer on how Windows Update behaves when it updates itself," said Nate Clinton, Program Manager Windows Update, in a blog today.
Clinton went on to say, "WU does not automatically update itself when Automatic Updates is turned off, this only happens when the customer is using WU to automatically install upgrades or to be notified of updates." That would explain what happened on the machines that Adrian Kingsley-Hughes observed. According to his blog each were set to be notified of any updates.
For the curious, the updated files on Vista are:
- wuapi.dll
- wuapp.exe
- wuauclt.exe
- wuaueng.dll
- wucltux.dll
- wudriver.dll
- wups.dll
- wups2.dll
- wuwebv.dll
- cdm.dll
- wuapi.dll
- wuauclt.exe
- wuaucpl.cpl
- wuaueng.dll
- wucltui.dll
- wups.dll
- wups2.dll
- wuweb.dll
All nine files are system files related to the XP and Vista versions of Windows Update (WU) itself.
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