OK, shamelessly cribbing the best ideas I've read....
1) Replace Spybot Search and Destroy with msconfig to stop Akamai from starting at boot
2) Keep the firewall controls in place to neuter Akamai when it is running. By the way, after Akamai times out the launcher runs through its prereq check, so I see a decent chance of it downloading any updates at that point.
3) Launch DDO with this wrapper bat file
cd C:\Users\your_name\AppData\Local\Akamai
admintool start
cd "C:\Program Files\Turbine\Dungeons and Dragons Online - Eberron Unlimited"
TurbineLauncher.exe
cd C:\Users\your_name\AppData\Local\Akamai
admintool stop
exit
which will need to be updated to reflect the directories on your system.
This automates killing the Akamai processes as the final step.
The end result is mostly what we had before this release, with the additional requirement of accepting the Akamai EULA and watching it hang before it times out.
Not as good as what we used to have, but it is only possible to fix so much of what Turbine breaks.