Whether it is automatically, which I'm pretty sure has happened in at least a few cases as I never knowingly authorized the driver updates that occurred, or by accidental approval because you get a zillion popup windows asking you to accept this or that, it is still annoying. The worst occurrences seem to happen when the Windows OS goes through an update. I often start having driver issues after doing a major or mid-level OS update, and when I dig into the issues I find updated drivers that I never authorized. Perhaps the updates make decisions on drivers that are older and determine they should be updated, like it not, and just updates them. That is my guess. It is annoying though as I have radio cables that I use to connect radios to my computer to program them, and Windows keeps replacing the drivers. Most of these cables only work with drivers from 2007 and earlier. I'm getting really tired of having to re-install the older drivers several times each year because Windows updated them for some reason.