Vista - How to get Vista to leave firewall settings alone?

Here's my problem-- Dngrswife's HP laptop is running Vista home. I have the Windows Firewall turned off because I have a firewall appliance between the home network and the intarwebs. If Windows Firewall is active, then the laptop can't get to the aforementioned intarwebs.

Currently, the machine is set to autoupdate. When Vista gets a major update, it reboots the computer and turns the firewall back on. It also lies and says the firewall is not on, but sometimes I can go into the Advanced tab and find the two boxes checked and have to uncheck them, and last night, everything was unchecked, but the Windows Firewall was definitely running and fouling everything up: I had to restart the machine twice to get it to show that the firewall app was actually enabled so I could disable it again.

So, will I have to turn off autoupdate in order to rein in this willful operating system, or is there some hidden setting that will bring it to heel?

If you don't want to use the Windows Firewall at all have you tried to permanently disable it?
You can do this by keeping it from ever starting:
Right-click on Computer
Left-click Manage
Left-click Services and Applications
Left-click Services
Double left-click on Windows Firewall service
Change status to Stop if has already Started
Change Status type to Disabled instead of Automatic
Left-click on OK

If you want to ever use it again you can just do the reverse of the steps above.

Fuck me, of course!

Thanks, Ed!

Meh, had to turn off autoupdate anyway... even after I disabled Windows Firewall, the next update screwed things up royally.

So, autoupdate disabled, and I will just have to update manually on occasion... yeah, that's going to happen.