[chuckup]

I would be interested to see if any other manufacturers are doing this as well.

You can easily check: if a file called wpbbin.exe is in your windows\system32 directory, that means Windows found and executed code that was in your firmware.

Or, see if your autochk.exe hash isn't from Microsoft (paste the hash into virustotal) If OK, virustotal would say, "Trusted source! This file belongs to the Microsoft Corporation software catalogue."

I ask because last month, when I searched for "wpbbin.exe" I found lots of people who thought they had viruses, posting scan logs to various sites, and the scan logs mentioned this file as well as things that looked like Dell and HP stuff. "Wpbbin.exe" is a file that would only exist in your system32 if Windows found it in your firmware.