Hi Pat, thanks for your purchase. The "check for updates" message comes up after a month's use in the starter edition, and if you simply press "OK", it'll go to a webpage to check to see if you've got the most recent version, and then not bug you again for another month. Sounds like you've got the latest version; there may be a separate issue that the installer just didn't update your version to 1.8.978; we'll check into that as soon as we can.
Incidentally, we're not charging for updates to the 1.x codebase (until the next major release).