... and with it came a revised Oracle Licensing Agreement:
Oracle Technology Network License Agreement for Oracle Java SE
As usual, I went directly to the Oracle download page to manually fetch latest installers for both 8u211 & 8u212:
Java SE Runtime Environment 8 Downloads
On Vista, both continue to work as intended; with every new JRE release, I would archive both and install either one (mostly the odd-numbered one...); latest release files were, up-until-now, publicly available, whereas the immediately previous and older releases, available via the Oracle Java archive, required an Oracle account ...
While the latest, Windows 7+, 64-bit (only), compatible Java (JDK) offerings are still publicly available (i.e. accessible without an Oracle account), I, like @Dave-H, soon found out, to my substantial dismay , that the current/latest JRE 8u211/8u212 files are now behind a mandatory Oracle account!
Then I had a read of the "Updated Licensing FAQs" over at
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/oracle-jdk-faqs.html
from which I quote:
... Off to java.com I go, then... ; the problem with that download page is that, for Windows users at least, it only provides 32-bit (and 64-bit) installers, and only for the odd-numbered JRE version (8u211) ; this already constitutes a limitation for Windows XP SP3 users, for whom the provided installers don't function at all; XP users need access to jre-8u21x-windows-i586.tar.gz archives in order to update their installations...
Also, in the Java Development Kit 8 Update Release Notes they mark both 8u211 and 8u212 versions as being (GA): "General Availability"; isn't that a distorted sense of the term "general", given that login-credentials are now required?
If you don't want to create an account with Oracle, I found file jre-8u212-windows-i586.exe FREELY available over at FileHorse; just be careful not to download their proprietary downloader (2.6MiB) but the actual Java installer (66.4MiB - use the "if it doesn't click here to start it" page link ).
For the .tar.gz archives, I'm afraid an account is needed (I'm not advising others to do the same , but I just visited this site and the first set of credentials there worked fine; for crying out loud, this is a free, "generally-available" file, so I don't feel shame in the slightest...).