Microsoft update installer rant

I'm pretty much at the point where I am ready to abandon Microsoft Office completely. It's not because MS-Word isn't a great word processor--in some ways, I suppose it is superior to Pages (which I prefer to use most of the time), and it still makes more sense to use Powerpoint to produce materials for Easy Worship, since EW can't deal with Keynote directly without me exporting a Keynote presentation as a Powerpoint file. No, all of this is secondary to my primary objection: the inane update installation process.

I sat down to use MS-Word today, and Microsoft's update installer interrupted me to tell me that there is yet another security update that I need to install. Fine. My beef is that the update installer is so intrusive that it requires me to shut down both my Web browser AND the Microsoft Update application before it can continue its work.

No other application I use (except for Parallels) is this aggravating. When a new release of Cyberduck is available, I get an install-and-re-launch option, and it leaves everything else I'm running alone. Acorn works the same way (Photoshop is way too bloated for my needs--Acorn is great).

But not MS-Office...I have to basically stop everything I'm doing and wait while it does its thing, then wait again while it checks once more to see if there have been any other updates during the time it was installing the current update.

Arg.