Visitors to the Help forums frequently ask us about AUMagic - a program that seems to be running in Windows ME (Millennium Edition). ZoneAlarm and other firewalls will report that this file is attempting to access the Internet. But what the heck is it and what does it do?

AUMagic is not spyware. It is a process that Microsoft installed to automatically check for updates to the Windows ME operating system. Therefore, your firewall will catch it when it tries to contact the Microsoft servers for new updates.

AUMagic will attempt to find updates for the following 4 files: USER.DAT, WUAUBOOT.EXE, WUAUCLT.EXE, AUHOOK.DLL - all of which perform functions of Automatic Updates. So basically, it's an automatic updater for the automatic updater!

We recommend that you allow AUMagic to do its thing. New updates for Windows ME are a rarity these days. Microsoft has effectively abandoned that operating system and now just tells its user to update to Windows XP. Nevertheless, you never know when a critical patch is going to be released, so allow it run just in case.

If you really must disable automatic updates, you can do so by clicking on the Start button, then Control Panel, then Automatic Updates.