Lately I noticed that my machine was taking longer than normal to show the desktop when I log in. I suspected something was wrong, but dismissed those thoughts since I had added a few gigabytes of pictures to the My Pictures folder. (I thought perhaps the pics were slowing down the processing of my user profile) When my DVD drive started to refuse to eject discs, I knew something was up. In going through the list of recent updates I saw that Automatic Update had installed the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification Tool.
Having already experienced the side effects of this horrible piece of software at work, (it labeled all of our lab machines as non-genuine one day, which took me a large portion of the day to fix) I immediately suspected it to be the culprit and began looking for a way to remove it. Oddly enough, I found the directions on Microsoft’s own website. This solution worked perfectly and my system is back to normal. I have now prevented AU from automatically installing updates and have blocked the WGA notification tool entirely. If you haven’t done this, I would highly recommend it.
Clarification: I am in no way suggesting that using automatic update is bad. AU should be enabled. However, as long as MS continues to abuse the “Critical” updates section of AU, we should take the time to manually approve each update.