BTW I noticed a ton of your issues seem to center around your networking...sounds like bunk drivers or bad hardware.
Before you say no...you might recall that when new versions of Windows come out oftentimes people find issues with hardware that they didn't realize it had before.
A lot of people finding memory issues with 8 that they didn't realize they had under 7 because of the way memory management works...and it's confirmed with things like Memtest...which can be OS independent.
Not saying you should go back to 8...but the mail issues, the disabling networking causing a freeze...all net related.
It's been that way since Vista if I'm not mistaken. You could just open the Start Menu (now Start Screen) type in the name of the program and hit enter.
It works for pretty much everything. 
I see your point but I`m fairly sure there are no hardware issues, not that being new prevents issues but most of my system is under a year old
Net issues were not the only problem, by the time I had enough of it, fresh installs of games were randomly crashing, things were generally annoying me on a daily basis, I know there are always teething problems, but I don't see any reason to put up with them when 7 is such a good OS, there is nothing in 8 that makes me want to put up with it any longer
I still have it installed on my laptop and there are no problems with it on there, but on my desktop it is a complete PITA, Metro is the most useless addition to a Windows OS I have ever seen and even using Start 8 didn't improve my experience
8 is the step to 9, that Vista was for 7 imo so I`ll happily wait