Microsoft is citing the settlement over Java with Sun as the reason that Microsoft is pulling the plug on a number of versions of various products. Here's an article from Eweek that goes into more depth on this.

I particularly like this bit of spin from Microsoft:

"We will not ship products that include a piece of software we can not provide security fixes for, thus we are phasing out some older products and re-releasing some older products without the VM. This applies to all channels." --Tony Goodhew, Microsoft Developer Division

Of course, this is also a good excuse for Microsoft to push customers to pay for expensive upgrades.