Finally found a few decent ways to get around that obnoxious behavior of popping up the same dialog every 10 minutes, even after I said “No” over on the Coding Horror blog.

The quick `n easy way is to run net stop wuauserv. This will stop the reminders, as well as auto updates, until you reboot.

To make it less obnoxious in a few ways in the future, I found the “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations” options to fit the bill pretty well. It prevents automated reboots only if someone is logged in. So, my unattended workstation at work will reboot after auto updates, but my desktop at home will wait until I tell it to.

I found another nice little read on the subject on the Tim Rains’ MSDN
blog.