Having read all the posts on this I think I will give upon this!
I have a brand new computer with 8.1pre-installed and, other than Microsoft Office, have very little third party application installed - printers etc and my screensaver won't work and never has!
Another triumph for Microsoft!
I experienced the issues with the screensaver on my Yoga 2 Pro, Win 8.1 X64 . If I set the screensaver to 1 minute it worked. I even adjusted the power options to never sleep and never turn off the display. No matter what I did if I set the screensaver
to greater than 1 minute it would not go to screensaver. I read the threads and thought of what I may have installed, software, applications and hardware wise. I recently purchased the Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse that goes through one of the USB ports. I installed
the software and drivers for it. Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center (2.3.188.0) for the software and Microsoft USB Dual Receiver Wireless Mouse (Mouse and Keyboard Center) as the driver (9.5.172.0). If the MS Arc Touch is plugged in to the USB the screensaver
does not work past the 1 minute setting. If I remove the MS Arc Touch USB wireless connection I can set the screensaver greater than 1 minute. So it appears Microsoft has broken the screensaver with the Arc Touch Mouse software/driver. I'm going to uninstall
the software and driver to see if that matters and just go with a generic mouse driver. If that does not fix the issue than time to move on and not have a screensaver that turns on past 1 minute.
Appears to be the Microsoft Arc Touch mouse and its software/drivers. I uninstalled and used the generic mouse driver, waited 5 minutes and the screensaver came on.
Not sure if this will help anyone, but now I know what the root cause of my screensaver issue was caused by.