Just registered here to say... THANK YOU! This stupid little Windows bug has been driving me crazy and to finally find a solution is a huge relief! I had this problem on quite a few machines (with increasing frequency) and was getting quite frustrated that I could never manually select which updates to install via the little notification icon. Just FYI, on my machine I never found any BalloonTime or BalloonType values. Nonetheless, I did as you stated and changed the other two values and it worked like a charm. Thanks again!