VISTA stands for Virtual Instant Surveillance Tactical Application. Its right in front of your nose and 'they' have a tendency to do this - hide things in plain sight or tell you to your face what they are doing (Intel [ligence] inside, anyone?? [As in Intel processor chips - do I really have to spell it out?!!]).
ALL interations of Windows that came after VISTA are built on that code base.
When Jim Stone was able to receive emails from his readers a while back a computer engineer sent him a text file of IP addresses in the host file of a Windows 10 machine and then explained that when one disables these IP addresses, either by deleting them or commenting them out, that the computer that the host file is on stops working! The IP addresses that caused this behavior went to Microsoft servers. I am not sure if this behavior applied to VISTA or not.
VISTA, which was released to the general public on the penultimate day of January 2007, was media/entertainment orientated but Microsoft's primary stated objective with Windows VISTA was 'to improve the state of security in the Windows operating system'. Ha! But one of the many problems with VISTA was its high system requirements, amongst other things. So it was ditched after only two years and in its place came Windows 7 (October 2009) which is the next topic I will be addressing.