On first running eric, it told me there was a new version available and directed me to sourceforge to get it. This makes perfect sense in an unmanaged software world, but in Fedora, the check should be disabled (and, of course, new updates pushed regularly).
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 14 development cycle. Changing version to '14'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
double-checked $ rpm -q eric eric-4.4.8-1.fc14.x86_64 and Help->check for updates seems to be disabled/greyed-out by default now. (Poke me if I missed something or if it behaves differently for you).