IE8 installed from Automatic Updates for NON-ADMIN user!

On two of our school's Windows XP SP3 computers (that we know of so far), IE8 has automatically installed from Automatic Updates even though nobody with admin rights was logged in.

I know Microsoft changed policy so that IE8 and IE9 would be offered through Automatic Updates without requiring the manual user interaction they did in the past. As best I could tell from the information I found, though, installation of these IE updates still required admin rights.

I don't know if I'm misinformed about the new IE Automatic Updates policy, and it really will install automatically even without admin rights, or if something strange happened that caused this on these two PC's.

I am concerned about what's going on because the student information system that we are stuck with until the end of this school year will not work on any IE higher than 7, so auto-install of IE8 will cause a lot of help desk calls from teachers that can no longer access the student information system. We have not installed the IE8 Blocker Toolkit, nor hidden IE8 in Microsoft Update or Windows Update, because our understanding was that our users not having admin rights would effectively prevent the upgrade from happening. I manage our updates with WSUS within our building, but we have MANY unmanaged PC's used outside our building/network that have Automatic Updates enabled directly from Microsoft, so if these start automatically updating to IE8 we will have to individually fix each one since we have no way to centrally manage them.

I did pull a copy of WindowsUpdate.log from one of the 2 PC's that auto-updated. I didn't see anything in the log that explained what happened.

Has anyone else experienced this? Anyone from Microsoft that can make sure I understand the IE8 automatic updates policy correctly and, if I do, explain how this update happened without admin rights?

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