aj, you said expressly, twice, "that is a feature that Google has hardcoded into Chrome. You CANNOT disable auto-updates", "hardcoded in Chrome".
Your statement is factually incorrect. That's my point.
It is not "hardcoded in Chrome". It's a separate application altogether, and it's soft-configured in Windows, not hard-coded into Chrome. The fact that it's soft-configured in the Windows registry, using documented APIs, means that it is easily disabled; there's even a utility written by MS employees, on the MS website, for such software configuration. I take hard-coded to mean that there's code built in to Chrome which tries to auto-update on startup, in an unavoidable fashion. But there isn't. It's not hard coded.