The article (and certainly the headline) rather leaves the impression that Microsoft cut off the beta for some unexplained reason, probably a problem. In fact the program reached its 75000 download limit in one day.

While the Security Essentials site only states US, Israel, Brazil and PRC, the Connect site also includes the UK.

The UK download worked like a charm...even submitting that I was in the UK without a single whine about it.

As for MSE itself, it seems ok...very small, very fast, and very consumer friendly. Need to test it's secuity handling more, but so far its picking up a lot of the test things thrown at it. It has no bells or whistles when it comes to features, but then again does it need any? Definatly worth a good test.

Surely universal rentaquote Graham Cluley must have something to say on MS's plan to destroy every home AV supplier's business model?

"The words beta and security appearing so close together make me a little nervous anyway."

let me rephrase that 4 you....

The words micro$haft, beta and security appearing so close together make me a LOT nervous .....

That download was available for about the same amount of time it takes a courier to get a nasty letter from a law office to Redmond. Maybe its dll's were making calls to servers they shouldn't have been making calls to.