seacue, most of the high end control interfaces are based on windows.
at one stage the advances of hardware and windows meant the end of serial ports. the usb edgeport fixed that and microsoft bought out an industrial version that was basically an XP interface with all the previous drivers.
I have no problems at all with the security being fixed up but leave the man machine interface at XP.
computers nowadays are far less useful than they were 10 years ago.