Meanwhile, How do I uninstall or remove Internet Explorer 8?, Knowledge Base article 957700 from Microsoft may help.

Backing off to an earlier setup via System Recover may leave remnants of IE8 on your computer, with automatic update thinking you want IE8 but that it just didn't install correctly, so they'll keep trying.

So far as I've heard, if you uninstall it so that there are no traces of IE8 on your computer, it should once again be an "optional update" and it won't keep trying to reinstall itself without asking permission.

(Note though that I've been a bit out of touch with the whole Internet for about a month, so Mickey's policy on IE8 may have changed somewhat while I wasn't looking.)

John