My problems with auto-update continued today. Battlefield 3 failed to start up properly. The mouse froze over the in-game menu. This was a proper hardware crash that won't respond to task switching (Alt + Tab) or interrupts (Ctrl + Alt + Delete).
I downloaded the latest driver from Intel (9.18.10.3071) using their excellent web-based driver update check. Unfortunately that didn't fix it. I tried older downloads (9.17.10.2932) but they all exhibited the same problem. I reverted to Asus support and downloaded two drivers. The newer (VGA_Win7_2k8R2_V815102712.zip) again failed, but the older of the two (VGA_WinVista7_64_V815102598.zip) worked fine.
I'm seeing a pattern here. Auto-update this last week has routinely destroyed the functionality of my PC. Worst of all, in the first instance at least, I didn't know it was that recent update that broke it. I'm going to have to be more disciplined about updates, applying them all in one go, not automatically, and testing my key software afterwards - a sort of manual regression test.
