Need help with a system refresh!

[SurrealCereal]

So, a windows update in april messed up real bad, resulting in my security packages being wiped along with some other stuff I still havent been able to figure out. (this is windows 8.1)
I decided to just put them back in and roll with it, because my computer wasn't really affected long-term, there were only a few apps still affected by the change.
Here I am now, after having tried numerous things from restoring possibly corrupt files and messing with the regedit, that I'm ready to try a system refresh (I've also heard this is good in general for your computer after it's collected a few years.)
I have a little star wars USB that I turned into a recovery media with the recovery drive option, and I downloaded a recovery partition from microsoft and put it on the flash drive myself.
So, I put it in during the system refresh all of the sudden the recovery media isn't valid. I'm losing my marbles here guys, what could I possibly be missing? The recovery drive is 14 GB and has 10 GB free after the recovery drive conversion, so I don't see what I can possibly do here.