If like me, a keen Windows Movie Maker user, you were surprised to find no Windows Movie Maker in your Windows 7 installation, you are probably very frustrated.
So here is the deal - as reported to me (No guarantees now). Windows Movie Maker has moved to the Windows Live Essentials suite. The current version of Live Movie Maker is in beta and has very few features implemented. In fact, so few as to be completely useless as a video editor in its current form. We're expecting great things however, once it is released and expect it to be even more capable as a video editor than Windows Movie Maker V6 from Windows Vista :-)
But here's the rub; we're a long way from release.
So what do you do in the meantime? Well firstly, don't go spending any money, you'll only regret it later.
What I can report (like not sure the licensing covers this) is that you can copy the Movie Maker directory from your Windows Vista machine's Program Files directory, straight into your Windows 7 machine's Program Files directory. Create a short cut to the MoveMK.exe on the menu/desktop, and - 'Bobs your uncle' - you have Windows Vista's capable V6 MovieMaker running on Win7 :-)
Now the gotchas: the video import from digital camera doesn't work in MovieMaker on Win7. There are some changes in this process in Win7, but it is ok because Win7's video import works fine. So import from the camcorder via the OS and then import the media into MovieMaker. There were a couple of DLLs I RegSvr32'ed - OMDBase and Pipeline (or PipeTran one of them) - to see if they played a role in the video import but that didn't help the scenario, so you may not need to do this bit.
Other than that, MovieMaker V6 on Windows 7 is working fine for me. Kudos to the original devs!
If that is all to much for you, then you can go and install the MovieMaker 2.6 build - which isn't as good as the Windows Vista build - from Microsoft Downloads.
But by either way, you can bask in the glory of your Windows 7 beta installation AND have MovieMaker to work with. 'Thank the maker!'