In the past, I had stayed away from this beast, as part of my intense hatred for toolbars/deskbars/etc. of all kinds.

I must admit, the MSN toolbar intrigues me for several reasons, first of all being that it comes from Microsoft. And they I trust not to have a nefarious reason for keeping customer info.

I do not distrust explicitly Google & Yahoo; I just trust Microsoft 100% and believe that Microsoft has more integrity than these two companies, and would not, now or ever, require funding to the extent that thay would try to monetize customer info,.

Secondly, it now has a user-configurable index store. I like to control where indices are on my system and this allows me to do that.

Thirdly, the install process and UI is pure MS, easy, slick, and warm/friendly.

Last of all, the preview option is nothing short of genius

Admittedly, it has been on the download server for a couple of weeks, but so?

Totally worth it!