re: cannot disable auto update
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Meyer
(1 messages posted)
Yes, wuauclt.exe was obviously designed by some sadist at Microsoft; I've had the
same problems with it refusing to die on my Windows XP box, and when I actually tried
sending the files to my Recycle Bin, it popped up that same message to me about how
it was going to do something awful to my system stability if I didn't have the files.
I looked up "delete wuaclt.exe" on Google, but the only results it had were a bunch
of folks saying "Don't delete wuauclt.exe!" with no indication of just what exactly
it would do to my system if I did. I've backed up most of my essential stuff, but
I just didn't want to take the chance of having my XP box refuse to boot altogether
or whatever, so I restored all of those files except for the prefetch (.pf) one.
(I've never had anything bad happen to my computer for destroying prefetch files.)
Since I was also trying to get rid of alg.exe (another file which refused to stop
running itself without my permission), I have discovered something that it might
interest everyone here to know: apparently, stopping wuauclt.exe from running on
your system requires that you stop alg.exe from running as well. The services manager
in msconfig.exe, alas, doesn't actually mention which of "services" listed on there
come from these files. I had to look them both up on the net.
That's the solution, in a nutshell: to keep wuauclt.exe from running, you've got
to disable alg.exe as well. Unless you need "support for 3rd party protocol plug-ins
for Internet Connection Sharing and the Windows Firewall" for some reason, you can
do this by disabling it in msconfig.exe or the "Services" manager program in Administrative
Tools. Its full name there is "Application Layer Gateway Service" and if it's still
running, wuauclt.exe will run itself on your system even with the "Automatic Updates"
startup disabled.
Msconfig.exe will even tell you that this is the case: you'll see the box unchecked
next to "Automatic Updates" in the services tab, and next to that, in the "status"
column, it'll say "running" even though it's supposed to be disabled. That's just
one more sight you never want to see that reminds you someone at Microsoft thinks
his program deserves to have more control over your computer than you have.
Bottom line:
Disable alg.exe (Application Layer Gateway Service)
Disable wuauclt.exe (Automatic Updates)
Only then will they both go away and stop hijacking your computer, unless they're
really viruses or trojans or something. It's not hard to see where blackhats get
their ideas for introducing viruses and trojans to Windows systems when some of Microsoft's
own "service" programs are virtually indistinguishable from viruses in their behavior.
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 |  | | |  | re: cannot disable auto update (Meyer: Wed, Sep 13, 2006, 6:52 pm) |
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