Why are we forced to update to 8.1?

Where are you getting this assumption that updates bloat and slow your system to a crawl? They certainly do not! If your hard drive is full, I would recommend that you buy a new one that has adequate space. My home computer has a 3TB drive that's future proofed for anything I need.

Also if my car dealer said he needed me to bring in my car to upgrade my car radio, tires, steering wheel, whatever for free - I would be there in no time flat. I would be grateful that they are giving me new products for free or fixing existing issues.

And Windows 8.1 brings a lot more features than just cloud storage like being able to search everywhere. Even a lot of the updates in Windows 8.1 update 1 brought a lot of changes that people who hated Windows 8 wanted. But you can only see those changes with Windows 8.1 as Windows 8 is no longer supported which is why they are pushing it to you.

Why would you not find a solution to the VPN issue instead of installing Windows 7? Googling the problem gave me several solutions to that issue.

Hamiltonboy78, if I choose to upgrade or am a basic user who will just click ok on any popup then that's fine. If I click NO and it still gets forced down my throat then that is utmost disrespectful. Some of us have reasons to keep their computers set up in a specific way. I don't find any "improvements" with 8.1 however, just like Ancient_Mariner I am a computer specialist and I also had to fiddle around to make the VPN access work again when it ran just fine on 8. As for support, what support is MS really providing? Certainly no support for that type of problem. All we really get as support are a boatload of "fixes" thrown at us every Tuesday and unless you read the KB's to figure out which ones you might need, you are bloating and slowing your system to a crawl. As for the respect, read my original post comparing the "upgrade" by a car dealer swapping gearboxes. How would you feel if your dealer were to do something like that to you?

And please don't give me the "you hate change" rubbish, I change where needed but I don't upgrade for the sake of upgrading which is all that 8.1 is. It doesn't fix anything that's broken, just removes some things that worked reasonably well before and adds more cloud garbage.

So how does not being able to connect to my company's VPN improve my computer experience? They don't support Windows 8.1. It took two days to install Windows 7 and rebuild all of my apps.

I want control of my own computer, thank you. I have been working with PCs since the 1980s, and I have never experienced this sort of hijacking before from a company that I used to trust.

And by the way, I AM a computer specialist.

This has nothing to do with lack of respect? They are trying to move you up to the latest version of Windows instead of something that is not being supported anymore. The Windows 8.1 update has a lot of updates that make your computer experience better.  If you are running into technical issues, you should take your computer to a computer specialist to resolve.