Hi Cajunmike:
A big welcome to our Forum. After reading your post I tried to tie a fly on my Windows 8 laptop and the results were not too good. I was able to tie the fly ok, but the key stroke actions were very slow and balky when compared to my regular Windows7 desktop. To name the fly I had to input the letters several times before it would come up with an alphabet. So naming a simple fly like "Adams" took a long time. However, after that I was able to name the fly after waiting a bit. After I pushed the "enter" key the new fly was saved to my RWFF main flies folder.
In the past we have found a couple of compatibility issues when trying to run RWFF on the new Windows 8 system and the fish building tool was one of them. These older addon softwares would run great on the Windows7 and even older systems but they just don't work in Windows 8. I have written Paul about this and hopefully he will come up with a fix for these compatibility issues.
On Windows 8 you can close the RWFF software this way and without a reboot. Push the Ctrl+Shift+Esc key at the same time will bring up the Task Manager screen and you can close the RWFF software by highlighting it and tell it to close. This will save you a few reboots.
I will forward your message to Paul and he will address it when he finds some time.
Regards,
Stanley