I hope someone can help here. I have found a few old threads on this topic but the problem is never resolved. 

I'm using Vista Ultimate and I cannot prevent my system from waking from S3 sleep to update the EPG at 5am.

I have used a utility that changes the registry and this works until MCupdate rewrites the settings back to 5am.

Has anyone out there managed to permanently change the download time without disabling MCUpdate?

Try disabling a mcupdate.exe in the task manager, then change the EPG time to your preferred time. For some reason, mcupdate resets the EPG download time to some random ungodly hour.

Anyway, disabling it before I changed the EPG time worked for me.

Thanks DirtJeans,

Not so much a fix as a work around.

Surley MCUpdate is necessary for other functions though?

I'll try this until microsoft fix the issue, unless there are anymore suggestions?

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing, but I've not gotten an answer. I'm not even sure what mcupdate.exe actually does. (And to make things even more confusing, that's the same name McAfee used to use for its antivirus updater.)

But if it makes you feel any safer, I disabled it a few months ago and haven't run into any problems yet.

I think this mcupdate has to do with the "sports" tyoe material.  I think when I disabled it, sports disappeared from the start page.  I may try to verify this later.  Whenever I changed to time for the EPG, within 24 hours it reset again back to its original time.  Maybe this is a good question for Jessica??

That's a good idea. Other folks don't seem to be having the same problem, but disabling mcupdate.exe seemed to do the trick for me (I discovered that mcupdate was the culprit by looking at Vista's Event Viewer log.

Hi

I have the same issue. Any progress on that topic?

Have you tried the TV Pack? Looks like the update behavior has changed once again...

Thanks,

-G

Found this thread while trying to solve the same problem on my machine (Vista MCE TV Pack)...

What I have found is that VMC does want to update the listings DAILY (which I don't need, weekly is enough), and it picks random times of day or night to do it, AND, if it happens to be downloading or processing the listings, your program will not record during that time! This has burned me on at least 3 occasions that I know of.

If I manually set the time for mc_update to weekly at 6:00am, it will run then, but then it adds an additional instance, which is daily, and random times again. I DO NOT WANT THIS!

VMC is almost totally useless with this random updating going on... how can I set it so it only updates listings when I want to?? thanks