I would like to ask if there are any of you still able to use updated versions
of electrum on Win 8.1 to please confirm here that it is possible
so I know if it is an individual issue or a general one.
Regarding the peculularity about ALSR (your question was answered by bitmover): Electrum windows binaries are created using Pyinstaller, which uses MSBuild compiler settings to make it work on those particular versions of Windows it's making binaries for. So you don't have to worry about ALSR settings in EXEs. It was a feature added in 64-bit Windows Vista (the mandatory part as well I believe) so it has long been a default compilation setting for the Windows compiler.