I just discovered the same thing.  There is no longer a way to turn off automatic updates.  Recently one of our sales guys needed to get a quote out to a customer, it was 9:30 at night and before he could simply send the customer a quote big brother QuickBooks forced him to update QB on our corporate server!  Does the design engineer/numb skull at Quickbooks who disabled this feature understand the implications to an IT group of forced updates like this?  

To me if we as customers we don't update our QB to receive security patches shame on us but for QB to force updates anytime of day without option to delay or turn off then QB should be liable for bringing down our corporate server or other wise disrupting our business operations.  

This is ridiculous.