It wasn't all bad news. T. S. counters with the following:

No tales of woe here. I've done about 30 IE upgrades so far over a half dozen laptops no problems so far. The majority have been on systems running XP some XP-64 and a few Vista. As far as the comment about people needing to update Flash or Java well there are good security reasons even the average person should try to keep those plug-in up to date if more people would keep them up to date there would be a lot fewer exploited systems in the world.

Of course, you don't have to upgrade to IE8 if you don't want to. Right? Well, not necessarily.

As reports, even some folks who've set Windows Update to not install patches without their explicit approval found themselves on the wrong end of an IE8 or other updates they didn't want.

Windows XP and Vista have started installing updates at shutdown, in certain cases, without displaying a warning or requesting permission, according to reports by several readers. The forced-install behavior has been witnessed at least three times by Windows Secrets editors, but Microsoft says its procedure for Automatic Updates hasn't changed in the last 10 months.