Update: Updated to Nvidia Rel 326 drivers today and the problem does not occur so it could very well have been a combination of various beta software and NV drivers for 8.1 that were still glitchy.
Neil, Thanks for the reply and want to thank you and Stardock for coming up with a very effective solution for MS's idiocy. The one game I am consistently noticing this right now is COJ:Gunslinger and I simply exit by clicking 'exit' in the game menu. The game is running the latest patch and the rest of my system is updated as well (latest drivers etc.) Contrary to what I saw earlier, the game does not indeed terminate when Start8 is running and after
One issue that I found is that some games will not exit to Desktop after using Start 8 1.17 Beta and windows 8.1 preview. This issue was present in 1.16 as well with 8.1 and is the only issue that is unresolved in 1.17. Pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del and selecting exit brings up the desktop with no sign of the application hung and this does not occur with Start 8 not running/uninstalled so definitely a Start8 related glitch here.