Disable JRE Auto update in Vista for all users?

Question

I feel like a complete idiot that I can't figure this out, but it's either so obvious I'm overlooking it, or I just plain can't figure it out, so I'm hoping someone here can help.
We have not yet been able to figure out how to simply disabled the Auto Update option when installing JRE under Vista, so it will never check for updates, no matter what user is logged into a pc. I've just installed the newest version 1.6.0_05-b13, but get the same results.
Basically, we are creating a "base clone image" of a Vista workstation and we need the auto update feature of the JRE to be disabled so it doesn't check for updates. When a new user logs into the pc, we want them to 'inherit' this setting from the default user profile, or we simply want a 'global' setting on the pc that stops all JAVA update checks from occuring. But even though there are multiple registry keys that 'look' like they control the auto update function, no matter how we set them the update option still shows it is enabled when you open the JAVA control panel.
We have 2 basic problems:
- When a standard user runs the JAVA Control Panel applet and they select the 'Update' tab, the option to "uncheck" autoupdates is "grayed out". If we make the user a local administrator, then it is not grayed out anymore and they can set the option. Problem is, we have thousands of users and none of them are local administrators, hence the problem of getting it to already be defaulted to not check for updates. How do we get the update checkbox to NOT be grayed out for a NON-administrator?
- How do we set the 'global' (or default) option to disable the auto update checkbox for ALL users? No matter what we try, when a new user logs in, the auto update feature is still enabled after their initial profile is generated from the first time login.
I was able to figure out if I change the "EnableJavaUpdate" value in the below registry key, it will "remove" the Update tab from the JAVA Control Panel. But does the simply remove the tab? Or does it remove the tab AND disable auto updates for ALL users on the computer?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Update\Policy
I've sent multiple emails to Sun asking for help on what should be a simple thing to do, but have never received a reply from them.
Keith Hemmelman

Answer 1

Thank you for the reply. I apologize for not getting back here sooner.
We actually already use a deployment.properties file located under the Default User profile on our Vista setup. It's located under the "C:\Users\Default\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment" folder. This file does get copied over to a new user profile when a new person logs in. This is what we want since we have set things like the maximum cache size and temporary file location.
The problem though is there is no setting that disables the automatic update check within this file. The best I can figure out is that for some reason under the Vista environment, the auto update setting is controlled in the registry at: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JavaSoft\Java Update\Policy
There is a REG_BINARY key there that appears to control this option. It is named "EnableAutoUpdateCheck". The problem is that the value of this key is "several" characters long and it is "different" from one user to the next. I tried disabling auto update under the Java Control Panel and then copied the value of this key into the same aread of the Default User hive but when a new user logs in, it ignores that setting and auto update is still enabled. I also tried using a simple "0" to disable the autoupdate or a "1" to enable it for this key, but it doesn't work either. (This is very frustrating why there isn't a simple 1 or 0 setting to turn the auto update setting on/off.)
We had no problem getting this to work under XP. Basically we didn't have to do anything special in XP. We simply created a temporary user account and made all the settings we wanted and then copied that profile over to our Default User profile and the Java autoupdate setting under the Java Control Panel was disabled for all new users. We did the same thing under Vista, but the auto update setting was ignored and re-enabled for all new users.
I read through the settings for the deployment.properties file located at the below link, but there is nothing there to control the auto update setting.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/deployment/deployment-guide/properties.html
Thus, we can't get the auto update setting to be disabled in the default user profile so it will in turn be disabled for all new users that log into the computer. This is extremely frustrating.
The other equally frustrating problem we have run into under the Vista environment is that when you run the Java Control Panel, the option to disable the auto update check is "grayed out" and the user can't uncheck this option to disable auto update. We have found you must be an administrator before this option is no longer grayed out. Since none of our thousands of users are admins, this is also a problem for us. (This option works fine for a standard user if you are on a XP machine though. It's just Vista where things have changed.)
I've sent repeated emails to Sun in the past asking for help, but they never replied.
Keith