How do you turn off Fullscreen mode in Windows 8?

            fullscreen at random

have to go back via Start to get to another window.         

Can you describe what you are doing which might be causing that?  AFAIK Fullscreen is a deterministic option on Desktop.  Do you have a keyboard?  You can start a new tab with Ctrl-t in either mode but in MUF your new tab can not be the Desktop About:tabs one.  Etc.  Sounds like you have W8 and are getting MUF IE some times and Desktop some times?  You can avoid MUF IE if you want in various ways.  I'm assuming that you are leaving the Toolbar in Auto-hide in Desktop mode because of your screen size?  Otherwise try my Alt-Space h  suggestion to toggle the toolbar back on in Fullscreen mode?

            even within the browser, I can't go from tab to tab because of fullscreen without first having to get rid of fullscreen.  It's an absolute pain.  I just want to be able to turn it off,

In either mode you can use Ctrl-Tab to switch to another tab.  In Desktop at least you can switch to specific tabs with Ctrl-<n>  where <n> is a digit which represents a tab from 1 to 9.  And if you press Win-T and had IE as your first Taskbar item you could see a list of your tabs as thumbnails on the Taskbar and select one using Taskbar preview.   In MUF IE you use Win-Z (or swipe from the bottom) to list your tabs.

The fix for Google Chrome is to click on the three bars in the upper right, then select "Relaunch Chrome on the Desktop."

"The new full screen stuff is there if you have a tablet, but if you don't, you aren't forced to use it."

I am not entirely sure I agree with your assessment. While you can indeed get much or even most of what is with Windows 8 to work like the old desktop there are a great many applications that insist on starting up in full screen mode, as though my $3000 computer with a combined (wide) screen size of about 81" is a 7" tablet.

I think I understand what Microsoft was going for but they totally missed the boat. If you want to use your applications like you used to you have to set the different applications INDIVIDUALLY. You can't just tell Windows 8 that you don't want ANY of the tablet features on your desktop.

All this brings even more credence to the idea that there are two teams of developers at Microsoft alternating development cycles but that sadly it is only the even numbered teams (or is it Odd I have lost track) that actually know what they are doing. This was a massive failure. Windows 7 was the first really good operating system that very nearly caught up with Mac, and was even better in a few ways the 'BAM' someone gets the brilliant idea that not only should the new OS support tablets (good idea) that it should ONLY support tablets, focus on tablets as its primary market and make desktop users everywhere want to throw their computers out their windows just like they did with previous versions of windows.

Can you get the sense that people are a little frustrated? You suggest a lot of work arounds and configurations but they are still workarounds and configurations where it should be possible to run this OS in either desktop mode (old way) or tablet mode (new way) not force desktop users to deal with a lot of nonsense, reconfiguration and settings on EVERY application to get it to work the way they like best. This is not a case of grumpy luddites failing to embrace a new technology that would only be better if you gave it a chance IT IS FUNCTIONALLY WORSE in substantial ways.

Could you please pass on the info that we would all very much like a single checkbox somewhere in the display or system settings to disable those features best suited for a tablet.

Thanks