I seem to recall hearing once before how some components installed through windows updater won't work properly unless Windows Exploder is your set shell.

I'm wondering if anybody's figured out any workaround to this yet?

My personal oppinion: There can't be a workaround if the windows updater tryes to run explorer shell extensions, update, change it's files etc. The only one who could do anything about this is Microsoft, make their updating system so that the shell can be updated without it running.

Although technicaly it's fairly possible if your a cracker and know how to "manipulate" any windows update installers so they bypass or alternatively run installations. But this wouldn't by far be as simple as just switching back to explorer for a few minutes to update(unless you have winXP ofcourse, heard they had some pretty big updates).

I'd love to help if i could but my word of advice, simplify quickly switching between explorer and LS instead, it's a lot easier and you get used to it.

What Hazardman said.

The smaller updates should work. Larger updates like Service Packs most likely won't. However, there is no guarantee at all. There are so many undocumented things that LS still hasn't figured out that it's impossible to be sure.

To be on the safe side you should always change back to explorer before installing fixes from windowsupdate; especially in case of security patches. Fortunately this isn't very difficult thanks to SetShell.