This has been bugging me for a very long time so I decided to see what others think about this. I have Win7 Ultimate with Windows Media Center uninstalled but WU still shows updates for WMC. Why does WU insist on updating software that isn't even installed and is there any reason installing such updates? Same goes for Office. From entire Office suite I have installed only Word, Excel and PowerPoint but for some reason WU wants to install updates for Outlook, Access and other Office stuff that I don't even have installed. So how do you guys proceed in a situation like this? Install all updates no matter what or ignore updates for programs that you don't have installed?
I occasionally do a reinstall every so often on my one test system and I see that a lot, mostly with Office stuff. Personally I wouldn't worry about it so much, it's probably some DLL's that gets shared among the other applications. Word for example has a few functions that interact with Outlook, and I get a couple too for Visual Studio, even though I don't have Outlook installed. Let the updates run, Outlook won't suddenly appear on your system.
I agree with jbysmith regarding office stuff, but, as WMC is a part of Windows System, you may not really uninstalled it, you only deactivated it and because of this you still receive its updates.
I have the same thing happening. I had uninstall Windows Defender and I still get the definition updates through WU. It can't be install...I have to hide it finally too. Funny thing is...it only apply to x86 system. For x64 system, I don't get these updates.