Sun's updater isn't the most useless thing in the world - at least it works, once in a while - but it always comes defaulted to "nag me every five minutes" mode, even though its background download is useless: All it downloads is the 50k downloader! Which then manages to time out while downloading, half the time (this hasn't been much of a problem the last year or so, but before that it was a major pain). And given that if they had any change management procedures in place, they could easily update only modified classes (there aren't that many in each minor version and patch level; all they need to do is update a few files in rt.jar, or place them in the "lib/endorsed" folder), my respect for the Java maintainers of Sun is pretty close to nil.

[/rant]