Additional support for communication with third-party federation services

Additional support has been added to allow Windows 7 clients to effectively
communicate with third-party identity federation services (those supporting
the WS-Federation passive profile protocol). This change enhances platform
interoperability, and improves the ability to communicate identity and
authentication information between organizations.

Improved HDMI audio device performance

A small percentage of users have reported issues in which the connection
between computers running Windows 7 and HDMI audio devices can be lost
after system reboots. Updates have been incorporated into SP1 to ensure
that connections between Windows 7 computers and HDMI audio devices are
consistently maintained.

Corrected behavior when printing mixed-orientation XPS documents

Prior to the release of SP1, some customers have reported difficulty when
printing mixed-orientation XPS documents (documents containing pages in
both portrait and landscape orientation) using the XPS Viewer, resulting in all
pages being printed entirely in either portrait or landscape mode. This issue
has been addressed in SP1, allowing users to correctly print mixed-orientation
documents using the XPS Viewer.

Change to behavior of “Restore previous folders at logon” functionality

SP1 changes the behavior of the “Restore previous folders at logon” function
available in the Folder Options Explorer dialog. Prior to SP1, previous folders
would be restored in a cascaded position based on the location of the most
recently active folder. That behavior changes in SP1 so that all folders are
restored to their previous positions.

Enhanced support for additional identities in RRAS and IPsec

Support for additional identification types has been added to the Identification
field in the IKEv2 authentication protocol. This allows for a variety of
additional forms of identification (such as E-mail ID or Certificate Subject) to
be used when performing authentication using the IKEv2 protocol.

Support for Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)

There has always been a growing need for ever more computing power and
as usage models change, processors instruction set architectures evolve
to support these growing demands. Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) is
a 256 bit instruction set extension for processors. AVX is designed to allow
for improved performance for applications that are floating point intensive.
Support for AVX is a part of SP1 to allow applications to fully utilize the new
instruction set and register extensions.