LS> Another thing is that he often takes "vi-" to mean "re-" like vipassana
LS> "re-view". And also some person I know takes vibhava as "re-becoming". But in the
LS> PED I don't find "vi" ever meaning "re". How do they get to that?
Only they know how they get to that.
One of the possible reasons is that English has few prefixes, and re-
is one of them.
In Russian there are lots of prefixes, so local people get into
another game - they replace prefixes on oversimplified one-to-one
basis, and some groundbreaking discoveries also occur.