Late yesterday, Microsoft began delivering Windows Desktop 4.0 automatically via Windows Update to Vista users.
While it is marked as a 'recommended' update and not a security or stability update, Desktop 4.0 does have numerous competitors, and also can use significant hard disk space as well as available RAM at times.
This probably should have been a clearer 'opt-in' add-on rather than an automatic delivery.
To Microsoft's credit, an announcement was made Friday about the upcoming release on TechNet.
I opted to uninstall and keep my resources as available as possible.
There are numerous Desktop search products available in the marketplace. Many use Microsoft's, Google's or others. Conflicts between these programs could arise with numerous calls to index your hard drive.
In other update news, Sun has updated Java Version 6 to Update 7 (which is clearly performing better than it's predecessor). If you have the Java automatic updater turned off, you may want to click the icon in your Vista or XP control panel and see which version you have on board.