Realized after reading that, that I had the original path in there twice, so here it is again a bit cleaned up.
What appears to be working for me at the moment is a renaming of the QBUpdate folder:

Original: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Intuit\QuickBooks\QBUpdate
to
Modified: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Intuit\QuickBooks\QBUpdate-RENAMED-BY-STEVE

It is an easy thing to reverse, and QBES doesn't appear to be finding it at the moment. - Steve