Neil, I am sorry I did not see your last post sooner. All great information and I really appreciate it. I am not completely discounting anything suggested, but I will say the problem only occurs for me when Start8 v1.30 is installed. I uninstall it and the problem goes away. Reinstall Start8 v1.30 and the problem comes back. I have uninstalled and reinstalled v1.30 a total of seven times now. If I install Start8 v1.20 (or 1.2 something, I am not looking at it), I have no problems at all. It is only with Start8 v1.30 that the problem arises. It does not matter if I have performed a clean install of Windows 8.1, upgrade install or an installation in either way while standing on my head and whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy.    

Scratch my earlier post about holding down the shift key fixing the problem. It fails to work about every fourth time. I started reading event logs, and working on any errors I saw in that, but so far, none seem to be directly related to this issue. Windows 8.1 seems to generate a lot of error messages for everyone, regardless of PC age, configuration or drivers installed ( obvious if you Google event viewer and Windows 8.1). Sigh. I did have one thought after searching through the logs. Could it be a permissions issue spat somewhere between Windows 8.1 and Start8 v1.30? By permissions issue, I mean that when attempting to shut down via Start8, Start8 is trying to write something to the hiberfil.sys in preparation for the hybrid shutdown and never gets to do so.....so the shutdown process fails? The message that I see in event viewer repeatedly after the failed boot process is that the system unexpectedly and improperly shut down. Well, since all I did is click the Start8 shutdown button, with no other open programs...then what failed or closed unexpectedly?

In fact, I just remembered, part of my troubleshooting process was to fast start, then disable hibernation using the command line (both are needed to get the hiberfil.sys file to delete itself. Once that was gone, I created a new hiberfil.sys file so that it would have my user permissions at "Full", and re-enabled faststart. I still had a problem upon reboot. I may not have covered all the needed permissions by doing this, but I gave up on troubleshooting Start8 at that point.

If it is not a permissions issue, I am willing to bet that my problem is a relational failure between the Windows hibernation feature (and thus related to hybrid shutdown as well), older hardware/related drivers, and Start8 v1.30 all together. Something in the "call" from Start8 during the shutdown process, that must have been changed in 1.30 that just does not cause the same problem in 1.20 on the same hardware, with the same drivers, on the same OS. So, what changed? It may not affect everyone, and it may not affect enough people to get Stardock's concern, but since those of us affected paid for the program, albeit not a huge amount, it would be nice if someone would simply isolate what exactly changed in the code between the two versions that affects the shutdown. That seems simple to me. You aren't looking for a needle in a haystack in this case. It has to be a simple matter of a line or two of code that specifically pertains to what happens when the Start8 shutdown button is pressed. Stardock, just compare the two freaking versions line by line for Pete's sake. If I worked there, I would do it. Really, I would...I volunteer to do so?  

Oh, and my laptop is a tx2500 With the crappy AMD processor and GPU. Blech! I will be reassembling my desktop tonight....ASUS motherboard, Corsair memory and Intel processor. I will not be upgrading from Windows 7 on that PC just yet, but probably soon and when I do, if Start8 is still on version 1.30, I will test it out on that. Actually, maybe I can fire up a virtual machine of Windows 8.1 on that system to test it out. It won't be an exact science, but the VM will still interact with all the same drivers from the host machine, so if Start8 v1.30 works on that machine, I will have to assume some freaky marriage of occurrences on the laptop between Start8, Windows8.1, and hibernation do not play well and never will.

I buy start8 for new computer, put it on and now I am locked out of start up screen where you put your password in.  Has to be this software.  I did a hard boot because I am unuse to windoms 8

sad face