Unfortunately, after upgrading to Windows 8.1, Windows Media Center now freezes the entire OS upon attempting playback of live or pre-recorded TV.  The only thing written in the event viewer before the freeze is a warning from Kernel-PnP  "The driver \Driver\WudfRd failed to load for the device SWD\WPDBUSENUM{guid-here}".  I may need to revert back to Windows 8... since there has been a code regression in this release.  It is of note, that I have done an in place upgrade to Windows 8.1 - after trying many different suggested solutions - I have also done a clean install of Windows 8.1. I cannot seem to shake this bug.  I will post back if I find a solution. The odd part is that playback succeeds the first few times... then I come back later to the machine and when I try to play live or recorded TV - it freezes the OS and I have to do a hard reboot.

Perhaps one question I'd like answered would be this - what type of device does SWD\WPDBUSENUM refer to?

this Portable Device Enumerator. Do you use external drives?

Wait until Microsoft releases the October 2013 GA Update KB2883200 which also updates WMC:

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/ga-rollup-provides-updates-windows-81-rtm

I do use external drives. In fact, I have the Windows Media Center recording storage set to an external USB3 drive. I hope the patch addresses this. I will come back and mark your answer as correct after the roll out (assuming it fixes the issue). Thank you.

KB2883200 does seem to have resolved the OS freezing issue... however it seems to have introduced a minor bug in its place - recorded TV shows are listed twice inside WMC. 

I fixed this by modifying the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media
Center\Service\Recording\WatchedFolders.  It had put the drive letter path (d:\recorded tv\) as well as the network path (\\mypc\recorded tv\) into the key. I removed the network path and all is well. Hopefully, WMC will not regenerate this.

nice to hear that your Media Center issue are fixed by the Update :)