I’m reading some speculation that Microsoft plans to release IE7 tomorrow (i.e., Tuesday, October 10) as a Critical Update along with some 11 security patches, all delivered via Automatic Updates.
For the record, I don’t think it will happen.
Microsoft has made it pretty clear in recent months that they throttle traffic on their update servers to make sure that the most important updates are delivered as quickly as possible. They’ve also suggested that the volume of traffic from those servers is sufficient to break the Internet. Given that tomorrow’s Patch Tuesday package is one of the larger ones in recent memory, why would they add a huge IE7 download to the package, potentially delaying the genuinely critical patches?
It’s possible that IE7 will be available for download this week, but If I had to guess, I would bet that the actual delivery date will be at least a week from tomorrow so that Microsoft can be certain that the majority of people signed up for Automatic Updates have received their monthly booster shots. Microsoft’s Scott Graff has already confirmed that the final IE release “will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download.”
Patch Tuesday next month is later than usual, on the 14th of the month. I think it’s a safe bet that the auto-download IE release will appear in the last week of October or the first week of November.
Ed Bott 
They should release it at Vista RTM. All, IE7, WMP11, Defender and .NET 3.0.
I also doubt it will be tomorrow. The IE7 blog had the following post today:
“We wanted to give you guys one last chat session before we ship IE. So if you can, you should join us for the chat this Thursday, October 12th at 10.00AM PDT (5.00GMT) otherwise you can catch all the action in the transcript.”
So if the webcast is 10/12 and it happens before IE7 ships… you do the math.
Have you changed something on your site? It’s not rendering in Firefox anymore.
The Automatic Update website seems to be down today. Anyone else experiencing this problem? And will IE 7 really be made available as a critical update rather than an optional one?