I've tried to read the previous posts and it appears that even if it appears that automatic updates is off in the UI, it's still going to update whenever it wants, causing unwanted disruption.  I had followed the prior advice to change QBChan.dat BackgroundEnabled=0 and that value remained in place and the UI shows 'automatic updates' as 'off' and under Options tab, Automatic Update options remain grayed out along with 'select the updates you want QB Desktop to download automatically' (the items that are checked or unchecked can't be changed).

We're running QB on a cloud server (AWS) running Windows Server 2019 and several users run QB Premiere Plus simultaneously.  Even with automatic updates off, I can't prevent the dreaded 'QB Utility' (or sometimes 'requires administrator privileges') prompt that users get when they try to open QB and since they are not admin on the server, they can't run it and work flow is halted until a server admin such as myself can launch QB and get past the QB Utility prompt.  I need a way to stop that from running and I posted another thread in the QB community https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/other-questions/qb-utility-randomly-but-regularly-... but never got a useful response.