I have tried studying the Auto Skirm widget to figure out its workings, but when I turned it completely off, I realized it never had any effect to begin with.

Instead, Storms and Rockos plot their own patrol points, and shoot at enemies even with Hold Fire orders. Why does this happen?

On a related note, the Auto Skirm doesn't work on a friends computer either, but he doesn't have the auto-auto skirmishing kbots either.

googlefrog converted the widget into a gadget ages ago.
He did so to workaround connection lag/ping.
(Afaik there is still a widget to send configs to the gadget.)

The gadget is only in Zero-K afaik.

You can turn this behavior off with the little lightbulb icon in the command menu:


If you play around in the menu there is also ways to set default states for units, so you can turn it off for any or all units if you want.

Finally, units should inherit factory state, so if you turn it off in the factory all units produced out of it will have smart AI off.

I think he converted it to a gadget also so that it would work with CAI (ZK's AI).