Hi Shenan,
When you want the charms bar (since yours sounds reluctant to appear, the exact opposite of the problem so many of us have had), use the Windows + C keys. For the rest of us, disabling edge swipes in the Mouse properties can disable the charms bar, but we
can also use the Windows + C keystrokes to bring it up if we so desire, so we've lost no functionality by disabling the hot corners & edge swipes. (Those functions were unnecessary to me anyway.)
Also, just as an aside, for all of the cheerleaders for 8/8.1, I've tried using the Netflix app: the English subtitles don't work, even when I have clearly selected that option in a movie. On one film, I then stopped watching, went to Netflix in my desktop
on the browser and picked up the movie where I left off: and there were the English subtitles. So, no, these new "apps" are not necessarily better/faster than the programs/methods we were already using. Some other apps are also useless (Bing weather, for example).