A few people on the microsoft.public.windows.server.update_services newsgroup mentioned concern over a flood of ATI Radeon Graphic Card updates. There were close to 4000 sync'ed recently to their WSUS 3 and WSUS 2 servers, and there was worry that something strange had happened.

Short answer: It's fine, though unpleasant to look at.

Here's some more background, partially from Bobbie Harder and with additional material from the rest of the product team.  We'll give you the technical backgrounder, and then some tips and tricks for dealing with large numbers of items in the UI.

As a reminder, the newsgroups are really the best place to discuss issues, provide feedback, and get help from the community and MVPs.  Responses to blog posts are occasionally read, but eventually get drowned in automated spam. 

Technical backgrounder

Yes you will see the meta data synched for 3976 versions of this driver, one for every unique hardware ID that it supports
on Vista.  That said, Keep in mind only metadata is synched down. The binaries are not synchronized until the driver is approved.  But dont worry
about having to cross reference every supported HW type that needs this driver in your environment.  Just do a bulk approve ( via multiselect and
approve) and the clients which need a particular driver and the correct detection logic will do the right thing.

Also be assured that we really only have about 8MB total binary size for all these updates.  All but 2 of the updates reference the binaries of primary
packages for x86 & x64 so you will not be downloading 4MB x 3976.  By all means dont just bulk decline these unless your positive you don't have this
type of card in your environment.  WSUS only synchs critical drivers and this is one.  Hope this helps.

We are changing the publishing process for the future btw so that multiple HWIDs will be associated to one update in the future.  thnks - Bobbie

UI Tips and Tricks

There are a couple of methods in the WSUS 3 UI that can help you manage the complexity you're hitting with this group of updates.

Right click the Updates view and create a new view.  You can create views to specifically include, or exclude this kind of driver.

Right click in an updates view, and choose Group By, and group by the update name.  Since these updates have the same name, they'll be grouped together in one bunch that you can expand or collapse.  On my machine, you'll see there are 3,982 items.  Once grouped, you can select the group header and do bulk operations like approve or decline.

-- matthew