I'm still hoping I'm not going to have to do a reinstall or a refresh of Windows 8.1 and have run across another interesting aside that probably has something to do with this.  When I look at the Event Viewer, Administrative Events, I have many errors that date back to 2/3/15, the 2nd week of having my new computer.  This is the week I discovered that the Store was not working properly.  So, I'd say it's safe to assume the event errors and the Store issues are related.  Anyway, here are the errors and their details -
- System 
  - Provider 
   [ Name]  Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service 
   [ Guid]  {89B1E9F0-5AFF-44A6-9B44-0A07A7CE5845
   EventID 1508 
   Version 0 
   Level 2 
   Task 0 
   Opcode 0 
   Keywords 0x8000000000000000 
  - TimeCreated 
   [ SystemTime]  2015-02-23T22:25:27.680171000Z 
   EventRecordID 42526 
   Correlation
  - Execution 
   [ ProcessID]  612 
   [ ThreadID]  6320 
   Channel Application 
   Computer crazydoglady 
  - Security 
   [ UserID]  S-1-5-18 
- EventData 
  Error The configuration registry database is corrupt.  
  File C:\Users\thatcrazydoglady\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\\UsrClass.dat 
- System 
  - Provider 
   [ Name]  Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service 
   [ Guid]  {89B1E9F0-5AFF-44A6-9B44-0A07A7CE5845} 
   EventID 1542 
   Version 0 
   Level 2 
   Task 0 
   Opcode 0 
   Keywords 0x8000000000000000 
  - TimeCreated 
   [ SystemTime]  2015-02-23T22:25:27.680171000Z 
   EventRecordID 42528 
   Correlation 
  - Execution 
   [ ProcessID]  612 
   [ ThreadID]  6320 
   Channel Application 
   Computer crazydoglady 
  - Security 
   [ UserID]  S-1-5-18 
- EventData 
  Error The configuration registry database is corrupt.  
These 2 errors keep repeating and they are all for UserID   S-1-5-18 and like I said, they began on 2/3/15.  On 2/2/15, there were lots of WindowsUpdateClient errors, so could that be part of the problem also?   So, is S-1-5-18 me?  If so, how can I fix this?  I also appear to have in the Registry these user ids also   S-1-5-19, S1-5-20, and S-1-5-21-18567169-1918087116-4124101320-1001  , but not sure which one is me as administrator, or.......???????
For the first listed error, when I go to C:\Users\thatcrazydoglady\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\\UsrClass.dat , I don't find there to be a UsrClass.dat, but rather 2 empty files that are INetCache and INetCookies.
Hope this helps!