I decided to give it a go on my trusty XP laptop so, after giving AVG the boot, fired up the installer.
No installation problems, and the system scan ran fine and nothing to report, but over the time that it's been installed there's one odd issue that crops up at login:
Microsoft Security Essentials isn't monitoring your computer because the program's service stopped. You should restart it now.The service always appears to start fine after I follow the instructions, but what's going on here? Is it a network issue that's causing it to give up?Click 'Start now' to start the service.