[Mark Haliday]

I agree this is a pain...

I registered every single plug-in with the usual "tick this box to be kept informed of updates and bla bla bla " routine and almost never got any info (apart from paying upgrades of course...)
Notable exceptions are McDSP who actually send you a CD with the latest versions (!), Mezzo technologies and more recently Waves .

To balance this one has to say that most TDM plugins are released in a viable stable form, probably one of the reasons they are more expensive. TDM users are not considered as involontary beta testers...