OK, OK, I'm calmer today.  And I am having a great experience with the AntiSpyware beta 1 installation on both Vicki's computer (clean bill of health) and mine (a few gotchas that SpyBot S&D missed and some new things that I really like).

So there is no mystery privileging as far as I can tell.  This material comes in fine, and it catches stuff about Microsoft sites/software as well as any others, so far as I can tell at this point.

Oh, and an odd thing of the kind that usually fires up my rant engine.  The Adobe PDF plug-in for MSN Desktop Search code is unsigned, and on Vicki's machine either the firewall or the AntiSpyware (or a slight different setting in local security policies with SP2 maybe) caught it.  It wasn't caught on my (no-SP2) laptop, so I will check the local policies to see if that's the deal.  So my rant would be about the inscrutibility of this stuff, and a possible too-generous default policy thingie, plus having the MSN Search site recomment a plug-in that involves an off-site link and delivers unsigned code. But I don't feel like ranting about it today, just pointing out that there is more to put in on this particular journey.

[update: I had wanted to make this be a comment on my previous comment at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=34827#34827 but my intuition about that failed.  I could fault the Channel 9 UI design, but I don't want to be distracted from the topic of this thread.  Heh.]