Lately I am seeing issues with administrator privaliges in windows 8 even though I have disabled UAC. When I run the x64 net installer by right clicking "run as admin" the installer starts fine however when I only double click, sometimes the installer finishes miktex installation correctly and sometimes it doesn't. Could this just be a windows 8 issue or should I really consider reformatting or refreshing windows 8 OS ?
Is there any reason why you keep using MiKTeX? I think that I read more about MiKTeX issues than about TeX Live issues. TeX Live runs fine on Windows and other systems, provides package management and updating from CTAN, is maintained by the TeX User Group with yearly fundamental updates. It hasn't the "Windows look", since it's cross-platform, but commonly it works on the background while you use a Windows editor/GUI.