Why not roll back to Win 2K?
You can fully expect to find bugs, lots of them, when all the drivers, hardware and even bloatware was designed for Win 8.1.
Everything has security risks, only way to prevent intrusion 100% is to stay disconnected
I think you are pretty much on your own with choosing to run a 3 generation old operating system. I know some companies with proprietary software choose to use older OS's simply becuase their software was written on that platform and they are too lazy to upgrade it. I know my employer just upgraded to 7 from XP over the same thing not a few months ago only because they had no choice, XP support has officially ended. Mainstream support of Win 7 officially ended a year ago.
On the bright side you may have begun the first support thread for win 7 on this platform.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein