The release of MSE 2.0 follows a four-month beta test program and is billed as significantly reworking the heuristic scanning engine, as well as adding Windows Firewall integration.
There is also a network traffic inspection feature, Infosecurity notes, and, whilst the earlier edition relied on malware definitions to spot viruses plus other code capable of causing problems with the host PC, the enhanced heuristic engine is billed as making the software more efficient.
According to Emil Protalinski of the Ars Technica IT portal, the network inspection feature does exactly what its name implies: inspecting traffic as you browse.
"It uses the Windows Filtering Platform in Windows Vista and Windows 7; Windows XP users won't be able to benefit from this feature" he said in his Microsoft Ecosystem column.
Protolinksi notes that the Windows Filtering Platform allows programs to plug themselves into the networking subsystem and monitor any network traffic, even whatever is allowed through the firewall.
Other features of the security software are closed integration with Internet Explorer, and the ability to prevent malicious scripts from executing.
Version 1.0, he says, only detected such scripts when they were written to IE's cache, by which point it could be too late.