Remember Windows Live Essentials, the service that went through its early beta stages back in 2006 and never made it out of beta, that’s meant to “offer integrated and bundled e-mail, instant messaging, photo-sharing, blog publishing, security services and other Windows Live entities into a seamless whole”? Today Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Experience Blog talked about how Windows 7 + Windows Live will “complete the Windows Experience” together – once again through the suite named “Windows Live Essentials”. The reasoning behind this, as explained by Brandon, is that:

Microsoft has learned that many end-user experiences need to be updated more frequently. Instead of waiting for the next Windows release, we began delivering updated versions of the Windows Live applications to improve those end-user experiences. While this was a great way to improve the Windows experience for users, many of these updates in Windows Live Wave 2 seemed duplicative of applications already in Windows.

To address this, Microsoft will now only ship these applications (which include Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Writer and now Windows Live Movie Maker) as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

Much to our surprise, MSN released version 9.5 of MSN Explorer/MSN Internet Access to subscribers as an update on Friday. The release appears to fix a number of issues surrounding upgrades to Windows Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Live Messenger.