Sorry you're running into issues with Windows 8.1.
We definitely want to help you out!
Could you post some more details to try to figure out what's going on?
Also if you can manage at all, I would invite you to join #ecere on irc.freenode.net as this may require a lot of back and forth. Also, the community is quite lively there at the moment so it's a good place to hang around!
Note that I successfully ran Ecere without any problems on Windows 8.
I've ran into issues on someone's Windows 8.1 laptop though and was quite at a loss to figure out what was going on, but it related to building applications if I recall correctly.
I believe I made a mistake when building the installer, I had not tagged the release yet.
I will rebuild and re-upload the installer to fix that, but it is otherwise the exact same thing, so no worries.
No you can't see messages on IRC unless there is a public log available.
This is why most people just always stay on IRC.
This is not really feasible with the Web applets though, so you're better off using a client such as mIRC on Windows or XChat on Linux.