Adaptive beamforming is capable of separating user signals transmitted on the same carrier frequency, and thus provides a practical means of supporting multiusers in a space-division multiple-access scenario. Moreover, for the sake of further improving the achievable bandwidth efficiency, high-throughput quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) schemes have become popular in numerous wireless network standards, notably, in the recent WiMax standard. This contribution focuses on the design of adaptive beamforming assisted detection for the employment in multiple-antenna aided multiuser systems that employ the high-order QAM signalling. Traditionally, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) design is regarded as the state-of-the-art for adaptive beamforming assisted receiver. However, the recent work (Chen et al., 2006) proposed a novel minimum symbol error rate (MSER) design for the beamforming assisted receiver, and it was demonstrated that this MSER design provides significant performance enhancement, in terms of achievable symbol error rate, over the standard MMSE design. This MSER beamforming design is developed fully in this contribution. In particular, an adaptive implementation of the MSER beamforming solution, referred to as the least symbol error rate algorithm, is investigated extensively. The proposed adaptive MSER beamforming scheme is evaluated in simulation, in comparison with the adaptive MMSE beamforming benchmark.