Source: blender.org 

The upcoming 2.44 release is an upgrade for 2.43, with mostly two months of fixing reported problems and a couple of nice new features.

The new features include:

- 64 bits safe code and files
- SSS subsurface scatter render

After this release, the big event/took/UI code reconstruction project will start, leading to the 2.50 release.

Release Candidate (RC) builds for 2.44 can be downloaded here.

Note: only the RC2 has SSS!

For the Windows build, you may need to install this official update. Vista doesn't need this, but users of older Windows versions should install it if they experience a crash during startup of Blender.

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)