>>As I said, I love the latest and greatest obsolete versions, ergo my updates are set to off, permanently. What may I need? Security updates for IE and Outlook - I'm not using either one of those.
>Is Firefox independant of for instance XMLHTTP already implemented in windows, or does it re-use the services already loaded ? I haven't checked, but as another Firefox user I would be interested to know, as it is the main reason for me to do the update dance.

I have no idea - I'd start from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html and look it up.