Awesome!
Just renamed the folder, started Chrome, and it's sat on v43.0.blah .... and is not updating itself. (Going into "About" previously always triggered an instant update if it hadn't happened already.)
Starting and using Chrome doesn't generate any unwanted "I'm broken" type messages.
In the "About" page, I now get "Update failed (error: 3)An error occurred while checking for updates: Update check failed to start (error code 3: 0x80040154 -- system level)."
Which is fine. Other than that, it doesn't seem to be affected.
This should be a sticky somewhere! It's a very useful piece of information.