It's necessary to wrap the worker in a "start" command when running the worker in Desktop User mode on these versions of Windows, otherwise the worker will either come up in a "panic" state or refuse to run altogether.
The command should be of the form:
start "Qube Worker" "C:\Program Files\pfx\qube\sbin\worker.exe" --desktop
You may also need to alter the path to the worker executable if you have 32-bit Qube installed on a 64-bit OS.
