Please don't take this wrongly, but i'm pretty experienced in the antivirus area, and Microsoft Security Essentials isn't really any good. None of the top review sites listed that as one of the best antivirus programs, i have NEVER seen that on any list. I do researches on this sort of topic, i read chart comparisons and stress tests etc, and that has never been mentioned on any site at all. I never liked any of the Microsoft security programs either, Windows Defender is crap and One Care sucks too. It doesn't offer the amount of protection and custom rules that a user can set, and not only that but i've used it before and still got virus infections.
I've done a lot of research and asked a lot of professional or experienced users in this sort of area, where the sites or forums i go to are dedicated for this type of stuff and none of them has ever mentioned using Microsoft Security Essentials, this is the first time i've had a referral of that program, and the first time i used it i only wanted to try it out coz i came across it, and it really sucked for me.
Take a look at this site for example:
http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-securi...llenge/results.php
anyway maybe anyone who is currently using Microsoft Security Essentials thinks it does fine because it deals with most of the simple viruses, but when it comes to a really serious infection on your PC, it might not be good enough. From experience, it doesn't show you much of any outgoing/incoming activity, whether it's a network connection or a program trying to access a certain file or registry etc, and that's just not very protective in my opinion.