Anyone ever have Automatic updates go bad and cause svchost.exe crashes?

I'd read some about it before, but never experienced it until yesterday. My company-issued laptop is the only PC I have with auto updates enabled and yesterday it started getting errors about svchost.exe crashing. My knee-jerk reaction was, 'uh-oh, virus', especially since I had just got back from a road-trip (damn hotel wireless APs). But, I updated my AV, did a full scan and did a Trend Housecall full scan- all came up empty. After some googling, I just turned off auto updates and restarted- no more errors.

I later found and applied a MS hotfix I found in their knowledgebase that sounded like it may fix the issue, but I decided to leave auto updates off anyhow.