I am now using 1.4.1.
I would like to report that on occasion, about once a week actually, the taskbar completely locks up. Right clicking does not work, clicking on the start menu does not work. When this starts happening, for a WHILE I can still use the Windows button on the keyboard to make the menu pop up. But I pretty much have to wait till a reboot, or till I run task manager and end the tasks, services, and restart them.
It seems to happen most when I use VirtualBox (I run a Windows 7 sandbox for testing stuff on my Windows 8.1 Update 1), or a Windowed game. It might have something to do with DirectX/DirectDraw, but that is pure speculation.
I am running:
- Windowsblinds 8 with the "modern" theme.
- Start 8.
- Windows 8.1 Update 1
- 2 monitors (don't know if this makes any difference, start8 on both monitors fails at the same time because it is the same process obviously)
- NVidia GTX650, Core i5, 16 GB RAM, plenty of harddrive space.
- Rainmeter for several desktop apps (only since about a week, the problem existed before then).
It is still the case that this behavior never happened on Windows 8 and 8.1 on version 1.3.x of Start8, it only started happening on version 1.4.x, both on Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update 1.
The resource leak fix in 1.4.1 seemed to have helped A BIT, since it doesn't happen more then once a week now, where before it happened 2 or 3 times a week.
The problem is that I cannot always reboot my system, sometimes I am running test inside my Windows 7 VM, and will have to work around a crippled system for a few hours until done.
Windows and all my software and drivers are generally on the very latest version, or at one version level earlier if I simply haven't had a chance to update yet. 
I don't know what else to report, but something is quirky in the 1.4.x build of Start8