It's not hardcoded in Chrome, at least on Windows it's not. I'm currently running 4.1.249.1045, which I gather isn't particularly recent, because I seldom use it except for Facebook and other sites I don't trust to be logged in to for general browsing.

Please do check and tell if you have the Google Updater service running and that it is working fine?

Else, please tell how you managed to turn off automatic updates in Google Chrome?

Google Updater is not running. I turned it off with Autoruns, like I said in my other comment.

Then how is that NOT a workaround? You are simply putting forth an argument which does even pertain to the point I was making.

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.