Microsoft is reporting they they have been receiving complaints from users, that their settings for Windows Automatic Update, have been changed by what appears to be a previous Windows update. The microsoft team wants your help to try and determine how this is happening, since they are unable to confirm that a update is responsible. On their blog they state:

We have been hearing some questions recently regarding Tuesday’s update release changing automatic updating 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.

 

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.

 

If you are running into this issue, your help would be greatly appreciated.  You can contact support, and they can walk you through the steps necessary to provide logs and other useful data.

They further describe the foloowing as well:

[Updated]  As discussed above, we have been looking into reports of AU settings changing during the recent security release, and here is what we have found:

 

• From the customer logs that we received, we found that none of the updates released as part of the October security release have made any changes to users’ AU settings. In fact, in the logs we reviewed, AU in all cases was set to “install updates automatically” prior to the October security release.
• I want to stress that the Windows Update client does not change AU settings without user’s consent. However, AU settings can be set or changed in the following scenarios:
  • During the installation of Windows Vista, the user chooses one of the first two recommended options in the “Out of Box Experience” and elects to get updates automatically from Windows
  • The user goes to the Windows Update Control Panel and changes the AU setting manually
  • The user goes to Security Center in Windows Vista and changes the AU setting
  • The user chooses to opt in to Microsoft Update from the Microsoft Update web site
  • The user chooses to opt in to Microsoft Update during the installation or the first run experience of another Microsoft application such as Office 2007

 So if you have become a victim of this behavior may I suggest you pass on your problem to Microsoft for analysis.

Complete article here.
 Comments welcome.

[tags]microsoft, windows, update, settings, changes, reports, support, information, analysis, [/tags]