Hi John,
Thanks for trying and reporting for me. Firstly I don't have access to a Windows 8 machine so I have no guarantee that it will work, but... let's see what we can do...
The second thing is- which buttons result in nothing happening? In the desktop module part or the server module? The server module will only launch command windows- they tell you whether the server modules are working. In the desktop module, QGIS and PgAdmin3 should launch, but depending on the read and write speed of your USB stick they may take *quite a long time* to load the actual GUI. Again the command windows themselves should tell you whether there are errors or not. Also if it's still waiting to load QGIS, for example, then quitting the menu will not quit the qgis process, so it's worth loading your task manager to see whether it's actually loading the executables or not.
On the subject of loading to a directory rather than a root drive- it's a common request, but requires a fair bit of re-writing of the portable code, so I'm hoping to include it in the next release, but (pleading sympathy) it's a spare time thing rather than a job so it depends on me finding some time to work on it really!
Regards
Jo
PS I'm unlikely to be able to help more until Tuesday, as I am away over the weekend, but will come back to this when I get back, if you are still struggling.