For some reason, IE is struggling to even display the page - it just seems to sit there loading the page without displaying anything, but hitting "stop" then "refresh" usually brings it up.  But if you kill IE (which best I can tell can only be done via the task manager - it has no other Windows controls) the doc server process does also terminate.

If you run the doc server using python.exe, you will notice tracebacks in the console due to the socket connection being reset (which is probably related to the above problems - the socket should have been fully read by the time you manage to kill IE) - but using python.exe the process stays alive serving requests.  I *guess* that the problem is pythonw.exe is hitting an error when it attempts to print to the invalid stderr handle.  It might be possible that somehow under Windows 8, stderr isn't buffered (or has as large of a buffer) as other Windows versions, so dies when a small amount of data is written to stderr - but I suspect the same problem could be provoked on other Windows versions by arranging for > 8k of "connection reset by peer" tracebacks to be written, at which point the buffer is attempted to be flushed and fails.

Here endeth my speculation for the day ;)