Steve Turner wrote:
A prompt keeps coming up asking me to join a routine that collects
information from my machine and sends it to Microsoft. I do not like
letting Windows call home unnecessarily. They don't need my input; they
seem to be doing a good enough job without it. How do I turn this
feature off?

Get a good firewall and when prompted say no to whatever outbound
application wants to phone home.

This free one does a great job (i.e. better than the Vista one)

http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/index.html

Go to the download page and grab your version (32 or 64 Bit). A
reasonable learning curve with all firewalls, so be prepared to get a
bunch of prompts until it is settled down and has learnt what you want
and don't. You can manually add programs to be blocked.

Frenchy