Here is my experience:
Bought a Microsoft Surface Pro with Win 8 last week and installed Firestorm v. 4.4.2. The application launched and ran, with some issues. Some sims experienced heavy flickering, others none. And right-click sometimes functioned, and sometimes did not.
HOWEVER: the system files on my hardware were from February 2013, and Windows wanted to apply updates, 32 in total, including one Firmware update. After these updates, Friestorm will not launch. It gets to 'Initializing VFS' and crashes. I just tested Singularity 1.8 and Naran's Viewer 2.2 alpha and get exactly the same result. I did not test the SL viewer because it is not supported on Windows 8.
This regression was introduced by some Windows update. I do not have the time to go and test each update to isolate which of the 32 updates did this. I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced this? Any ideas on what to do to Windows 8 to fix this?