How do I tell Windows to shut up about Silverlight?

The problem is described well here, so I won't repeat it; but basically, hiding the Silverlight update the naive way doesn't work.

So the question is -- how do I tell Windows to shut up about Silverlight and stop bringing it up on the list?

So, problem is there are 7 different versions of Silverlight. Some are older, some are newer.

You can manually Hide, "Check for Updates", Options, Hide them in a loop 7 or more times. I don't want to do that manually so I wrote a WSH js, save as WUA_xSilverlight.js:

var wu_Session = WScript.CreateObject("Microsoft.Update.Session");
var wu_Searcher = wu_Session.CreateUpdateSearcher();
wu_Searcher.Online = false;

do {
  WScript.echo("Searching...");
  var silverstreak = false;
  var searchResult = wu_Searcher.Search("IsHidden=0 And IsInstalled=0");

  for(var i=0; i<searchResult.Updates.Count; i++){
    var wupdate = searchResult.Updates.Item(i);
    if ( ! wupdate.Title.indexOf("Microsoft Silverlight") ) { // if -1
    wupdate.IsHidden=1;
    WScript.echo("   Hiding update: " + wupdate.Title);
    silverstreak = true;
    }
  }
} while ( silverstreak );  // repeat search

Execute the saved file: cscript.exe WUA_xSilverlight.js. I could have optimized the search and so the code, but it works so blah.

The issue became clear to me when I hid Bing Desktop v1.3 and Bing Desktop 1.2 showed up next. Upon careful inspection I had noticed that the Silverlight updates are each with a different date.

So lets say there are 10 Silverlight versions released. V10 will obsolete v1 through v9 and only v10 will show up. Choosing to hide v10 will cause v9 to show up, hiding v9 will show v8 the next time you check for updates, and so on and so forth.

If you are persistent about it you can hide every single version of Silverlight and it stops showing up (until the next version is released by MS).

I recently had this issue also, after installing a Windows 7 VM for work. Having not used Windows for quite some time this was very annoying to me as well.

I had a clean installation of Windows 7, upgraded to whatever the latest service pack is as of this writing and I'd refused to install Silverlight. However, it appears that Windows 7's service packs now "preload" portions of Silverlight, making it show up in Windows Update even when not technically fully installed. Highly irritating.

To fix this issue, I followed the removal directions in the following article from Microsoft's Support website: How to clean a corrupted Silverlight installation and then reinstall Silverlight.

After doing the complete removal from the "Let me fix it myself" section, Silverlight has not once showed up in my Windows Update.

Update (2015 09 17): If you have Microsoft Office installed, this won't work. It works on Windows 7 as described. Upon installing Office 2013, Silverlight gets installed and the updates in Microsoft Update persist. I haven't yet found a way to stop it with Office installed. Without Office, maybe only Office 2013, these instructions still work.