The fact that some users continue to claim on this forum indicates the problem is more widespread than I thought. I have ordered an old version of the Arduino with an FTDI chipset for USB and will use this as a solution.
Having recently obtained an new laptop running Win8.1 64, I went through lots of pain and hoop jumping trying to get drivers installed for my hardware ICSP programmers, but you know what didn't cause a bit of trouble? I plugged my FTDI based Nano board in and Windows already had a proper driver ready for it, nothing I had to do.
The FTDI is a great general purpose USB serial COM port bridge and is my preferred solution over the direct AVR usb based solution. I realize that added capability of being able for the AVR to act like a USB host device can be a big deal for some, it just seems over complex and troublesome for those that just want PC COM port communications to be simple and reliable.