Thanks much, Chewy.
Very troubling. Of course it was too good to be true; schweet MS, offering free updates to the latest & greatest OS. I'm on a metered connection, so I'll have to turn off the bit-torrent feature. Plus all the workarounds for the privacy rape.
Thankfully, I haven't updated yet, and will wait a few months to do so. Perhaps things will get better. Or worse.
In the worst case scenario, I will have to learn to install and use Linux. Fortunately I did download the last release of Truecrypt for Linux even though I've never used Linux other than to play with. It's what I use to protect my personal data, and despite all the brouhaha about it recently, it's good enough for me.