Yep, that would be the tech. I don't think I can rule either out at the moment. Right now I only have my observation that uninstalling RDP 8.1 from Windows 7 fixed the issue for myself and a few other users. I was able to as I mentioned downgrade one 8.1 pc and I think the issue no longer occurs but the person who uses that pc rarely logs into the production environment so I won't get any feedback back anytime soon. I have some brand new PCs coming in this month so I can see if the issue occurs on them before they get turned over to the users.
Update. The newly ordered PCs with Windows 8.1 came in and still experienced the same issue. We purchased support from Micro$oft and our "resolution" for the issue was forcing the Microsoft Terminal Service Client to use the older "RPC over HTTP" with reg_dword "RDGClientTransport" and a value of 1 under "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client". *Edit 4/13/2015* "If anyone from MS wants to chime in I would LOVE to hear what you have to say as I found this fix on a (non-technet) post that claimed they payed for MS support to get this answer, which is hardly acceptable if true..." -M Keller <social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/bd96e1a9-81ec-4306-bacc-4cff442d30c8/rds-2012-http-udp-gateway-connections-reset> This goes for M Keller and anyone else who happens to come across this post. I apologize for how I sounded when I posted this originally. To be fair to Microsoft I was probably dealing with Microsoft's level 1/outsourced support and didn't really push for a better resolution to the issue when this registry tweak corrected the issue.