I came across this thread while looking for a way to ... CLOSE START8! It always cracks me up when somebody says, "Can you do such and such?" and the immediate reply is, "Why would you do that?"
Well, here are two good reasons (besides just plain "because I want to"):
- I want to see what the vanilla Win 8.1 interface is like. (Yeah, yeah, why would I want to do that?)
- Unable to turn of Start8, I went to uninstall it. But when I went to do that, I got a message that said something like "Is Start8 still running? If so, please close it before continuing." Nice. Real nice.
So, having done a web search, found this forum, opened a command prompt, done a CD to the Start8 directory (all highly intuitive ... if you happen to be old enough to remember DOS), and managed to turn off Start8. Maybe I'll turn it back on. Depends on how well Microsap has done its work. But I wouldn't have thought twice about turning it back on if I hadn't had to go through this exercise.