I used to think so, but over time, I'm leaning toward "no". It takes so much time and effort to prevent these updates, only to catch Windows silently overriding your changes when you least expect it. And updates have alot of hidden triggers that can reenable it. I've had some successes over time, only to see "installing updates, dont power off your PC" when shutting down, and thinking "goddamit, not again!".
And now, if you remove components, Windows will just reinstall them when updating. I've been ripping stuff out with MSMG Toolkit and NTLite, only them to find later returned.
The only useful scenario i can think of for preventing updates, is when running Windows in a ramdisk. In that case it is essential, since they just bloat and fill the C drive. Windows has to fit entirely into RAM, with enough left over for software to run. That is hard to pull off with updates enabled.
I would like to try a ramdisk setup, but it is also volatile and potentially unstable. On top of that, if you want to make changes in the ramdisk, you need a way to flush the changes back into the image, or everything is lost after powering off. Not sure how to accomplish that.
Opinions?