Well that's a relief. It seems that a few (different) issues have been reported in this thread, so it may be more than one, separate issue. But I at least, have explicitly described my one.
I have installed Windows 7 Explorer for Windows 8 (Ex7forW8), and so far - although it is VERY early days - I am reporting a (positive) marked difference with the win7 explorer.exe - no more explorer restrictions in context menus or file opening, obviously no crashes (though I've only ever had about 4 or 5 crashes over many months of heavy usage, so this statistically means nothing at this early stage, it's only been a week), and it's as if I can run more programs now. If I'm getting heavy on the ram, it just does the GOOD OLD little freezes and micro-hangs that I'd much rather experience. So far, so good. Ex7forW8 is great too, easy install and one-click setup, and no 'issues' that I've noticed so far. Chrome is being a bit weird though, a new behaviour is that I simply cannot open (pretty much), new tabs, it just hangs (not program-can't-move-mouse-wise, but as if it's an internet problem) as a blank white page and the loading circle forever and there's nothing you can do but use another browser tbh.
And so this makes me think that my chrome problem may be a chrome one, something they changed with recent updates in the beta channel. BUT it still is obivously windows explorer related, because if it's no longer crashing on me (I still have the same amount of tabs open), that's a big change.
It may just be I need to restart it once more and it's some weird other one-time anomoly.....I don't close my browser very often, because, well, why?...
This will all be in continual testing indefinitely, so I will report if anything interesting happens.
Remarkable that I have to pull up the previous OS version's explorer to fix this huge issue in the OS.