I take it by saying, "I had windows 8 working and then it decided to give a 'Unable to Initialize Element Server!'" that you mean that DirectSOFT was working in Win8 and then stopped working in Win8 giving this error. There is a separate executable called ESMAIN.EXE (Element Server Main) that is necessary to run DirectSOFT. Obviously Win8 is not letting it run. This is usually due to security of some sort. You might try to right-click on DirectSOFT5's shortcut (or DSLaunch's shortcut) on your desktop (assuming you have DirectSOFT5 since you didn't say) and select "Run As Administrator..." and see if it works.