Venue 8 Windows 8.1 - Can't update Windows or log into Microsoft account

For anyone who may stumble across this thread later, I seem to have fixed my problems. Much of it comes down to being unfamiliar with Windows 8, and the big differences between it and Win 7 (possibly complicated by using a tablet for my introduction to Win 8?) At any rate, i have discovered that when I "turned off" my tablet it was not actually shutting down and thus never really rebooted, and so was getting no updates.  I knew lack of updates was the problem but didn't know why or how to fix it, as every time I tried to manually initiate the updates they would not load, I just got the spinning icon.  Eventually it got so behind on updates the tablet would barely run.  Fortunately I stumbled across the "Restart and Update" command, which finally caused a full reboot and loading of all of the backed up updates. It took two rounds of "restart and update" to get everything running again but seems ok now.  At any rate, a potential hazard of just picking up a Win 8 tablet and making assumptions about how it works based on years of using other MS platforms!