Had to manually force the deadline applications to run as administrator otherwise it wouldn’t work on win 8.1
I had it before with the dl6 aswell… no idea how/why as I have things turned off where possible so not sure if it’s my win 8.1 but perhaps useful to know 
Some of the developers (including myself) are on Windows 8.1, and we haven’t experienced this behavior. Have you seen similar problems with other applications (ie: 3ds max, etc)? It might point to a configuration issue with your 8.1 installation…
I do have it with max and some other applications.
No idea how it got this way. It’s driving me completely nuts…
But figured this was my problem…
fixed it now (did have to elevate the slave & the launcher, otherwise the launcher couldn’t launch the slave…)
Are you on a domain? I’ve seen some wonkiness where an older version of the domain controller tries to set security parameters for Windows 8+ incorrectly since the software was written prior to Windows 8. Your domain group policy might be trying to change your UAC on or to a higher setting than necessary.