You have to set the width of the AutomaticUpdater in the constructor of your form. When you set Animate to false the AutomaticUpdater doesn't touch the width at all.
Bug with AutomaticUpdater.Animate property
In my project, I set AutomaticUpdater.Animate=false to disable the text animations. However, this caused a bug where the text would mysteriously disappear, i.e. the updater panel and icon are still visible but there is a blank space where the text should be.
In AutomaticUpdater.cs, I think the problem is with RefreshTextRect() on line 1356, because isFullExpanded is always false when Animate=false.
I was able to fix this problem by changing "if (isFullExpanded && Width != expandedWidth)" to say "if ((isFullExpanded || !Animate) && Width != expandedWidth)". Does that make sense?