Thank you Doug, Terry and Ralph:
Apparently you fellows on the west coast are the technology leaders! Based on your experiences and with no update to Softrak's position, I think the prudent recommendation to any user is to stay with Windows 7 if possible. That's hard to do if one is purchasing a retail computer because those are mostly Windows 8. However computers intended for the business market are easily obtainable as Windows 7 since very few corporations have plans to adopt Windows 8 (yet).