Not a solution, but alas a work around. I modified the SWFOjbect 1.5 "expressinstall.swf".
Instead of it popping an alert I have it remove the movie clip that the auto updater swf is loaded into. I manually put some Flash content to link to updating. Including a template on our site that is Flash but wide enough for the autoupdater.swf to run properly. It's not elegant, but it gets the job done for that small percentage of users who have Flash but are not current with Flash Player 9.x
