Reboots after Updates - really needed?

I was a very happy user of Win 2k. I guess I had to reboot it no more than 2 or 3 times each year.

Now, in 7, every single time an Update (Windows Update) is performed, system asks to be rebooted. Hiding its requests or keep postponing every 4 hours is tedious.

But today I am really "angry" because of today's updates: I recently switched to MSE (Security Essentials), and the installed update was ONLY a MSE update. In general, it's just an antivirus! Why 7 wants to be rebooted even for something like that?

It really seems that, besides any logic, 7 simply asks for reboot every time. No matter if needed or not. And for me that IS a problem.
I am a developer, and it happens so often I have hundred files opened. It happens i need to remind myself what I changed 5 days ago into a specific sourcefile.
Rebooting means losing the entire undo history, temp files I simply use as reference, and a number of other things I don't need to bother you with.

The only "solution" I can apply now is to simply ignore updates till I'm ready to lose everything, but sometimes this may mean MONTHS. So not really a perfect-world one, I'd say.

I think 7 is a great OS, but this rebooting things is really pissing me off.
I know there's no solution because it isn't properly a technical issue, but I'd really like to understand if there's a single valid reason for this absurd behavior.

You can go into services.msc (Search for that in the start menu), find the Windows Update Service, double-click on it, then click Stop then Disable the service. Click OK then from that point onwards, Windows Update will no longer prompt you to restart your computer. If you want, you can disable the Security Center service as well. I disabled both security center and windows update on my computer.

HH2012,

Thanks for the reply, but I already knew about that (it's what I meant with "Hiding its requests").
My post is really about this Win7 policy: when security updates are released, I would be more than glad of installing them. And I can understand reboot requests when updates are changing something at kernel level. But I cannot about anything else.

Since Win7 is out, I saw threads (both here and around the internet) of many peoples complaining about this. And I saw Microsoft promised not to do the same on Win8. But why can't they release an update that will fix this even on 7?

I understand what you're saying, but I have to disagree.
I've already disabled any automatic update: I am alerted when updates are available, and I install them whenever I want. I removed ever possibility for the OS to reboot automatically, so that's not a problem.
In general, when new available updates are notified, I first look at what they are. If big ones, I simply do not perform the update because an update there would be expected.

Windows Update is not helping at all there, as it always says that computer MAY NEED rebooting after the update. Why WU can't expilicitly say which updates requires reboots and which do not will always be a mystery, for me.

But this time I felt to write something about this because of the kind of update: it was only a MSE update! I mean, it was a virus database definition update, nothing more. And I'm positive something like that would had simply needed a service restart of MSE itself, not a full system reboot.

I don't know about XP, as I switched directly from 2k to 7. But in these years, I cannot really remember a single update that hadn't asked for a reboot. Not a single one.

I used to have AVG (had it for years), and I can't remember a single time a reboot was requested because of it.
AV tools are integrated, but still services. They can be restarted, and doesn't need the full OS to restart for this.
However that was a specific case, if you want. But am I really so unlucky that I've never been able to apply an Update without reboot requests?

I understand I may not be a average user, but the fact is that those reboots are always required, whichever is the reason. Tricks to avoid notifications are just workarounds.
At least 2K used to tell me if a specific update would had needed rebooting.

I gave up on AVG for the same reasons. But its updates just required service restart, no reboots