Windows Live Writer Beta 2 has shipped, a mere 9 months after beta 1.  Seems like a long time, but it is a polished and free blogging tool that I use to write a lot of my posts. (Being able to simply paste and thumbnail images is a big time saver.) 

Joe Cheng, one of the developer, has a blog post about the highlights (as well as lowlights), a few of which I have excerpted below.

• Adding categories: Yes, you can finally add categories directly from within Writer! You can even do it while you’re writing a draft offline, since we don’t actually “commit” the new category until you publish. (WordPress users can even specify hierarchical categories!) Oh yeah, Blogger labels work now too.
• Extended entry support: I was embarrassed that we didn’t support this from the beginning, as this is a crucial feature for a lot of users. We probably would have, had we known then it would be nine months before our next release.
• Post synchronization: If you publish a post from Writer, then edit it online, then open it back up in Writer, you used to get just the original post. Now we’re smart enough to fetch the modified version….
• Inline spell checking: Surprisingly difficult to do right, but very important to our users.