Bloody windows update!

Well, I just found another reason to love windows update. I tried it out on my shiny new laptop this morning, running XP SP2, and it came up with 41 "critical" updates. So, I went and installed them and it asked me to reboot my computer, as normal. I'm used to this by now. I also discovered another annoying little feature -

After I rebooted tho, I was still getting the little yellow shield in my taskbar saying "there are updates available for your computer". So, I clicked on it and it came up with 13 updates to MS Office. I went back to the windows update webpage and got it to check again for updates, and it came back with nothing. You'd think that if you have an update mechanism that it would behave consistently! If one finds some patches, both of them should find them.

It gets even better then. After I installed the MS Office updates, I was asked to reboot my machine! For an office update! I don't mind rebooting after some security patch to a windows service or something like that, as it's a change to the OS, but for frickin' office? Does that mean that office is so tied into the system that it updates windows components as well? Hmm, wasn't there a court case about that sort of behaviour? ;-)