How to programatically disable auto-updates

I've got a special kind of problem with Sparkle 1.5b6.

I have an app that let's you create "droplets".

Essentially this works as follows:

1) copy the application
2) store some settings inside the copied application bundle that will cause it start up as a "droplet" and apply these settings automatically

The problem with Sparkle is that I need to be able to disable automatic updates for the droplets, which of course share the same info.plist, defaults, etc than the "main" application.

I've tried various ways of doing this:

1) change the info.plist for the "droplet" application

of course this won't work because the defaults (which are shared) will override the setting.

2) use the setAutomaticallyChecksForUpdates method to disable the feature on startup

The problem here is that I'm not sure when to do this (the updater gets initialized from the nib file potentially before the main controller, so there might be a race condition there) and I suspect that this will write the new settings to the (shared) defaults as well.. right?

I had hoped that the delegate would have a method somewhere along the lines of

- (BOOL) willCheckForUpdates;

where I could block the call, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I can only think of two more ways of doing this:

1) I am implementing the version comparator, so perhaps I could do something like:

if( isDroplet) return NSOrderedSame;

That would block all updates. Right?

2) I could also create a separate defaults domain for the droplets..

BUT surely there's a better way of doing all this and I'm just overlooking it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Frank