problems with latest mega-upgrade | PM utility not found?

Good morning --

I'm running MikTeX 2.9 on a variety of Win 7 machines. I keep one of 
these machines as my 'MikTeX test' machine, since major upgrades can 
(and have in past) cause some problems -- at least in the short run. I 
don't routinely upgrade MikTex -- never been sure why you really need to 
update as soon as updates are released (unless its a security update). 
If you're generating correct output with your current install then...why 
update? I digress...

Given the scope/number of updates, thought it would be interesting to 
see if anything breaks. So, my usual approach is

1\ make .zip or equivalent backup of my current MikTeX install. If you 
install as a single-user, this works fine. You can roll back to this 
version simply by extracting everything back out from the .zip archive.

2\ run the GUI-based MikTeX updater utility. Lists all those 
packages/binaries etc that need updating. For this effort, looks like a 
huge core of the install has been touched, and will need updating. A 
couple of updates are selected by default. Go ahead, click the ok to 
upgrade button and...get the following error:

The MiKTeX package management utility could not be found.



Turns out this is the same problem as reported yesterday. Suggested 'fix'...

You can install the utility manually by unpacking (7-Zip) the contents
of the package archive miktex-mpmcli-bin-2.9.tar.lzma into the MiKTeX
installation directory.



2 questions --

1\ is it really necessary to do this generally, or is it a specific 
nuance for particular installs? Presumably this sort of 'kludge' 
shouldn't be necessary in general.

2\ where does one actually get/find/download said .lzma file?


Seems like there are a few issues with the latest mega-upgrade, 
including the one I describe (and which at least one other person has 
posted about -- I received an email from 2 colleagues saying they ran 
into *exactly* the same problem.



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