I'm having trouble with Windows 8.1, too. EMM worked great for the last month, when my new PC was running Windows 8.0. Last night I upgraded to 8.1 and so far Ember is the only program having trouble. I can no longer scrape movies consistently. It just hangs on the pop-up "Search Results" screen. Even when it finds matching titles, it keeps searching and won't let me choose the correct result.
Most often when it hangs on this screen, I have to ctrl+alt+del to close the program. Sometimes the "cancel" button works.
I installed 1.3.17 (from 1.3.15) to see if that would fix it, but it hasn't. I also replaced the file referenced in this thread:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=176078 and have also tried running the program as administrator and in various compatibility modes.
Anyone else have this problem and figure out how to fix it?
Thanks, Greg
UPDATE: Maybe this is just a coincidence, but it might be an IMdb issue. It's working now that I disabled that scraper and am using TMdb.