Continuing Blender 2.4x series lets us do periodic bug fix releases while new features are focused on Blender 2.50 (two point fifty, not five), allowing developers to perform radical changes that require a longer development cycle.

A complete list of bugfixes is avaliable if you want to read all the nasty details. Or keep on reading for a quick "short" version:

• SSS now works with panorama render.
• Removed artifacts with negative lights when using SSS
• Disabled SSS for preview rendering, so it didn't slow down other preview render at all.
• Fixed error in "Transform Constraint" with planar constraints when the plane was perpendicular to the viewport.
• Fixed the vector blur error in "Ztransp" that produce black lines (on edges) appeared, which didn't get blurred away.
• Fixed an error in the Particle System that cause bad results for command line renders, especially when rendering first frame of animation.
• Fixed Verse crashing in 64 bits Linux.
• Math node now has reflective behavior.

• Multires meshes with UV's and vertex colors would crash in many cases.
• Importing 3DS files with lamps failed.
• DXF Importer updated, includes stable support for 3d objects and blocks hierarchy.
• FBX Exporter updated, includes fixes for better compatibility with other applications and support for exporting animation with armature deformed meshes and objects.
• Collada support updated for better armature support.
• Bundled python modules were not included in 2.44 by accident, making some scripts fail in 2.44 that worked in 2.43 (Windows Only, when Python was not installed)

• Fixed bug in the shadow calculation that cause errors where specularity would ignore shadows.
• Changes to the insert keyframes method for determining when to replace existing keyframes with new ones. Now, it shouldn't create so many keyframes stacked on top of each other.
• Blender would crash if boolean operations were done on objects wich resulted in an empty mesh. This was due to accessing invalid memory.
• Remove the options "make local" in the Outliner. It didnt work properly and produced errors in the linked data.
• Edgesplit crashes are fixed, the problem was that "bridge" vertices (which connect two or more faces that don't share edges) were not being included in the maximum final vertex count calculation (used for memory allocation, hence the crashes).
• Fixed Multires Editmode memory leak. Typo in Multires Editmode integration meant that far too much memory was getting allocated for a pointer array (more than 10 times as much).