My Canon XF Utility program suddenly stopped working - freezing immediately after opening. I eventually uninstalled all the Win 8 updates after 18th of May. This did the trick

Thanks for the info. I haven't loaded XF Utility on my new i7 Win 8 machine, instead using my i3 Win 7 machine as before to export from the CF card to my external hard drive. Then edit with the new computer.

I have all windows 8 updates installed (except one so it does not update my Nvidia driver autom.) and XF utility does still work as expected.
Might want to update anyway and reinstall the utility.