I know you were being funny, but I just ran into this recently.
The IE install on the system was so broken that I had to go to cmd and start an ftp session to ftp.mozilla.org. That told me to use releases.mozilla.org, which had the latest version ready to fetch. Downloading firefox that way worked fine.

So if you are in the 10% that doesn't get detected you're SOL? I hope they can increase the accuracy of this.

I'm not going to get into why having automatic updates on is generally a bad idea, that subject has already been beaten to death here.

WindowsXP-KB972260-x86-ENU.exe /quiet /norestart

That is the one for XP with IE6, the filenames are different for the other flavors. The list of all of the different patches is at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-034.mspx/