Hello,
Thank you for the update on the issue and thank you for the work you’ve put into finding the cause.
The short explanation for why extension update doesn’t work at this time would be this:
The communication with the Google servers was performed through a generic function which has been blocked in the current release. Unfortunately that function also managed the extension updates among other things. The issue has been fixed on our side so the next release will have working extension updates.
The dragon_updater issue looks like another kind of beast…
As long as the update service is running, it should write to the log file. It logs all update checks, service start and service stop.
Could you run Process Monitor and restart the update service? It will attempt to create the log file during this operation and it might also tell us why it fails.
Regards.