Restarted MW but no popup messages.

Something's broken then, there should have been a popup. Anyway, I'll be releasing 0.5.8 in the next few hours, and if you're running 0.5.7 there should definitely be a popup with a message from me.

oops I notice I appear to be redownloading two copies of the macupdate and another copy of the 0.5.7 standard update.
OK I'll manually update.

uh yeah. 0.5.7 and redownloading one copy of each of the standard and mac 0.5.7 update now.

Edit: Is there any kind of cache I should get rid of that might make a difference for the continual update downloads? Not that it happens all the time, just every session.

Have you disabled "Share downloaded files"? That's how I check if the update has been downloaded and it might not show the popup if the option is disabled.

I think these are default:
Check for updates every 48 hrs. Automatically is checked. Share downloaded files is checked/enabled.

I don't think I should be downloading the updates every session if there's multiple sessions in one day like today. It's ignoring the every 48 hours for a start.

Ok I'm going to have to try and reproduce this with fix expected in 0.5.9.

There is a hardcoded update check a minute after startup regardless of the "every 48 hours" setting. I'll fix that for 0.5.9 as well.

No hurry to answer this, I don’t mean to distract you but just a general question:
Doesn’t this mean that the network will become a set of islands. If you recall BearShare attempted to do this totally for a period of time before relaxing it slightly.
Potentially like an archipelago of isolated groups with no boats to reach each other. Other islands might potentially have what someone is looking for.