I think I have it after additional event viewer digging. Access Denied was the common thread. We have a GPO that provides "everyone" Full Control on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Not smart and was very surprised that this was here but need to find out why before changing it. At any rate in Windows 8 Explicit Permissions are required in quite a few areas. I seems that since "All Application Packages" was not Explicitly given permission that group was implicitly denied. I used regedit to give "All Application Packages" control to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and then after reboot Live Tiles worked!