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Just built the latest (pre)release Blender 2.5 from Subversion. Man, that
looks quite different: the old “Buttons Window” is now called “Properties”,
and has been majorly reorganized. Also those accustomed to pressing the
spacebar to bring up the main menus (as I have been) will be presented with
a single scrolling menu with just about every function in it, with a search
box to narrow down the option you want.

When I first started it up, I found the interface was very slow to redraw
and respond to my actions. Turns out this has hit a number of people, due to
the vagaries of graphics-card drivers. To work around it, go to the User
Prefs window, and under the “System” tab, try one of the options other than
“Automatic” in the Window Draw Method popup; for example, “Overlap” makes
things a lot better for me.

The Python scripting interface has been completely reworked: old scripts
would import functions from the “blender” module, but that is now gone; all
the new functionality is in the “bpy” module, including direct access to
much of the same operations you might perform interactively, which you
didn’t have scripting access to before.