WinInet - avoid the WiniNet Cache COM+ surrogate

I first asked this question in "General Windows Desktop Development Issues".  Some suggested links led me here which seemed an equally appropriate place.  Sorry for the double posting.

I hope I'm wrong, but it seems that with newer versions of WinInet (in Win7, as of the upgrade to IE11) you can't avoid an instance of dllhost.exe (hosting a WinInet Cache object) when using WinInet.dll's HttpSendRequest (at least with GET or HEAD as verb).  That dllhost.exe process starts even if INTERNET_FLAG_NO_CACHE_WRITE is specified in HttpOpenRequest().  And that instance of dllhost.exe hangs around for 6 minutes.

Please tell me I'm wrong (that the instance of dllhost.exe can be avoided, and how) ... or perhaps how to shorten its timeout.

And (a bit off-topic, but along a similar line) ... can I shorten WmiPrvse.exe's timeout (of 90 seconds) or taskeng.exe's timeout (of 5 minutes)?

Thanks.   - Vince