[drumttocs8]

You can certainly test the theory pretty easily with Wireshark

[_carbyau_]

I was lazy that day. But today! I just used procmon, filtered to include "systemsettings.exe", turned off all the other guff and just saw network packet meta data (no content).

And yes, as you browse around system settings there are TCP connections to MS servers. I don't know that they are "blocking" though and have run out of care factor.