Win 8 seems sensitive to rogue programs

I installed the latest Nvidia display driver last week. After the reboot there was the green win 8 logo then the screen went black and stayed that way. I left it running for an hour and it stayed that way though the mouse cursor moved against the black background. I did a restore from a backup using Shadow Protect made right after win 8 install to get it back. Then a few days later I installed a skins program that was supposed to give background color to windows instead of the default white. The same problem with the black screen happened again and I did the same restore. This never happened with xp. A bad program would freeze, I'd use task manager to end it, the desktop would come back and I'd remove the program. I imagine an update will fix this, but till then I'm keeping a backup handy whenever I install new programs.