There also appears to be an issue with an error message "COM Surrogate has stopped working" which MS claims back in the Vista/W7 days is "caused because of codecs and other COM components installed by various software that aren’t fully Vista-compatible, like some versions of DivX or Nero"
Unfortunately the fix which is to turn off DEP for the offending dllhost.exe doesn't work on W864.
I've resorted to yet another reset to factory default, restoring the original W8.0 image.
