Hi,

I have just fired up a WinME and an XP Pro box (SP1). Neither of them are running wuauclt, so you should be safe to turn that one off. Like yourself, I don't do auto-updates, preferring to run them manually on my own machines.

csrss.exe IS running on my XP box, and I must admit that I had never given it much thought. I suspect that it may be used by more than the Windows update?

My suggestion is to do a search and get the free version of WinPatrol from BillP Studios. There is a facility to disable startup programs so you could disable it, see what happens, and if things go belly up, just boot into safe mode, run WinPatrol and re-enable it.

I know, I am a lazy bugger but I have found it a useful tool when fixing machines that people's kids have filled with junk so they don't work properly anymore, or where there is some sort of "deadly embrace" going on.

As I said, you should be safe getting rid of wuauclt.exe, as my machines run fine without it. I have not installed the latest WinME autoupdate on this machine as I don't use it. This could explain why the program is not present.

Hope that helps