Windows 8 Restart Desktop Window Manager

Use Taskmanager or ProcessExplorer and simply kill/terminate the DWM process. Winlogon.exe automatically restarts the DWM.exe process.

Here is a nice way to do it: open the command prompt with administrative rights.

windows key -> type 'cmd' -> right click 'command prompt' and choose 'run as administrator'

then type

taskkill /f /im dwm.exe

I'm not sure how to give Josh the credit for this (from the comments above), but the answer ultimately came from: Why does Desktop Window Manager leak memory or even crash?. By disabling hardware acceleration on Chrome and restarting it, then letting things sit overnight DWM went from 4.4GB to ~446MB which is a dramatic difference. It looks like other things are still acting weird/slow (even after using magicandre1981's answer - specifically doing a search in the Start area takes 5+ seconds to accept characters) which doesn't feel right on a system with a Quad i7, 32GB DDR3 and 4GB video RAM, but maybe I'll still just have to stick with the occasional restart still. Whenever I do a reboot everything is blazing fast again.