There is no end to the pain and suffering that this annoying dialog has given me. The worst is when the only option is to restart, as forced by the IT people at work. The only way to get around it in this case is to move it off of your screen as much as possible so you can continue working.
However, there is a workaround that I just discovered, and I wish I had known about ever since I installed Windows XP. Just kill the process ‘wuauclt.exe’ in task manager. Or, if you’re unfamiliar with task manager, do the following: go to the command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and type “sc stop wuauserv” (without the quotes, of course). Voila!
[via Digital Inspiration]
UPDATE: Just killing the ‘wuauclt.exe’ process did not work for me, at least at work. When I killed it, the dialog just popped back up again. However, using the “sc stop wuauserv” worked like a charm. It seems that when you kill the process, the windows service is still in the background monitoring its status. So, take down the root of the problem by killing the service. To make it easier, you can do what I did and create a batch file (.bat) with the following contents:
sc stop wuauserv
pause
The pause is in place so I can see the output and verify that the service was indeed stopped.
