I was trying to help a friend work through some problems with Chirp on Win8.1 the other night. (We were actually swapping info back and forth at the bottom of a shared g-doc we were using for logging net check-ins, so not the best medium to convey meanings.)
She indicated she'd used Chirp in the past but that it was broken after the switch. My first thought was that the 2.3.0.0 (counterfit-tolerant) driver wouldn't work under 8.1 but a found a short thread in the Chirp archives that suggested it does work and that shouldn't be an issue.
Also, she said the Baofeng SW that came with the radio/cable does work, so presumably that installed a driver that works with the cheap cables.
I asked her if she'd trying running Chrip *after* getting the Baofeng utility working, but that's where we ran out of time.
I'll pursue it further with her, but thought I'd ask here in the interim for any gotcha's that might crop up with Chirp and Win8.1.
Benton 29may14 -- KF7QLP benton@siletzbay.com