Hey Guys,
I am trying to run apprentice HD on my windows 8 machine and it runs really slowly and oddly hangs everytime I create a basic flame pyro network.

My config is
Processor :Intel i7 3.5GHz
GFX Card: Nvidea Geforce GTX 660Ti 2 GB
Ram: 16GB
OS: Windows 8 Pro 64Bit

Houdini doesn't even utilize 10 percent of my ram and doesn't even get close to 10 percent of my cpu performance and yet its giving me issues.
Any suggestions?

Actually it hangs after like 2 -5 min of usage, doing whatever.

If you're using the Nvidia 310 beta drivers, downgrade to 306 instead.

That worked perfectly thanks.