Microsoft allowing Google back door access?

I'm sure most of my readers know that I am not a fond fan of Google. The spying factors and all. And yes, blogger is a Google product, but I post things here, because I want Google to know what I think, and why. Anyway...

The other day I was (shush) forced into a corner, into using Google Voice. It was the only option I had at that moment. So I had to install their little "plugin" in order for things to work. One would think that a browser plugin should only work or be active, when the browser is active AND that plugin is being used. But we are talking Google here.

After the "need" was over, I rebooted my Windows 7 system and I noticed in my router log files, some outgoing connections to some "tools" thing at Google. So I opened task scheduler, and found 2 entries created by the Google software, that would run at boot, and then "every hour" after that. The (cough) idea being that Google wanted to check to make sure you always had the latest "tools". Yeah, thanks but no thanks. So I disabled the tasks from running. That should solve the problem, right?

A short time later, I rebooted again... and... damn... there was that traffic in the router again. So I started up Process Monitor (a great free utility from Mark over at SysInternals) and asked it to make a bootlog of the processes being run. Rebooted, and then looked at the log file.

Low and behold, Google was still DIRECTLY calling the task files (they are stored in the Windows Tasks folder) even though they had been disabled in Task Scheduler. Well, screw that, I though.. So I deleted the tasks, and rebooted again. WooHoo!!! Yup, that solved that. Success!!

But.. wait... my IP blocking program (PeerBlock) was showing that there were about 200 attempts in the space of 3 seconds, to go out to the Google address, again.

So this time, I went in and uninstalled the Google plugin. Google was still blocked, and that caused close to 500 attempts to speak with the Google servers. So once again, I rebooted. And it finally stopped.

So... Dear Microsoft... WHY is it, that Google can still run tasks, even though they have been disabled? What kind of "special" access do they have?

I'm really not liking this. At all.

Just sayin.