Thank you Azmo for making this post and to all who replied with what seems a workable solution.
To agree with Azmo ...
I am a long time user of Avast Free.
I saw a message that Avast 8 had been installed and had a software updater program. Okay, fine. (Somewhat my mistake for having automatic updates turned on, but I also didn't really want to check every week to see if I new version of Avast was out and whether or not I wanted to update (and sooner or later, I would have to update or change programs).
The ONLY option presented was something about either the Ask or Google Toolbar and making Ask my default search engine - I unchecked both of them.
Avast IMMEDIATELY started downloading updates for a lot of my non-AV software without any prompts. I cancelled the updates and then opened avast and went into settings and turned off the software updater. (I didn't think about going into Add/Remove Programs and changing the installation type.
This worked (after I updated the first program that it had already downloaded the update for), except I still got an error message that software updates were critical, even though the updater was turned off.
There are several things that I would like to see happen:
* Avast should give me the option to choose whether or not to install new components when updating.
* I would like to see Software Updater work similar to
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/ for Firefox or SeaMonkey - i.e., I can click the software panel and Avast will tell me what software is out of date and give me the option to update it now, update it later, or never prompt for updates for this software. As it is, that option is not available, the only things I can do are:
** Leave software updater active and let Avast update all my software whether I want it to or not.
** Uninstall the software updater component entirely through the Add/Remove Programs option screen.
** Turn off the software updater function but deal with nag prompts every time I log on that critical software updates need to be installed.
FWIW ...
