said by Name Game:...but as we suspected it was set again by default to do that auto update crap..even though in 7u7 it was set to never do that.
That is par for the course these days. Just about everyone (Adobe, Apple, Oracle, etc) ignore previous preferences and sometimes even the ones you select at install time and enable/re-enable auto updating.
I actually have a mental checklist to go disable/uninstall auto-updating. I also check to see if any services were added and remove them if they were.