Windows Update Hammering Your PC Too?

So there's an ancient laptop in the kitchen we use primarily to stream music during breakfast and to run BOINC.  For the past couple of days, even given its age and small memory, it took it nearly a billion years to start its first application.  The hard drive was completely maxed out, and Task Manager noted that wuauclt.exe was taking up a HUGE chunk of memory.  I've just noticed on the other laptop the same massive performance hit, also while wuauclt.exe was chewing up the system.  I seem to recall that wuauclt is the Windows Update Automatic Update Client... what the heck is the problem here?  Can't wait until they take care of that...