@Islandboyjd, it is a painful experience but raising these issues directly with Microsoft will hopefully get Microsoft to investigate the root cause of these problems. In the end, Microsoft was not able to determine why I could not install KB2919355 on one of my laptops. After further escalation, they provided me with Windows 8.1 install media which allowed me to do an in-place repair that fixed the software stack (details in my post of June 25/2014 on page 35).
If your computer came with Windows 8.1, you should be able to extract the product key and use that key to download installation media from the Microsoft site. Based on Robert's post on March 13/2015 and my response on March 15/2015 on page 62, it should be possible for you to create recovery media even if you only have a Windows 8 key. I have not tried to do an in-place repair using this recovery media nor have I heard of anyone in this forum confirming that the procedure worked for them.