A post on Thursday on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog reports that not only were there 1.5 million downloads of MSE, but almost 4 million malware detections from 535,752 machines were encountered!

According to the blog post:

Microsoft Security Essentials is available in 8 languages and 19 markets at RTM, which covers a lot of the PC using world. The geographic distribution of detections so far still closely follows the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta countries, and is ramping up in other countries that use the 8 languages.

Just as interesting is the tidbit that some 44% of installs were on Windows 7 machines (some 3 weeks before being released to General Availability, even!):

Check out the blog post for more on what kind of malware is being detected in what markets, very interesting.

You can download Microsoft Security Essentials (requires Windows Genuine validation) and try it out yourself, provided you’re in one of the 19 current markets.