Whyile reinstalling Windows I discovered that DayZ fails to load because the msvcp110.dll and msvcr110.dll files are missing.
These files are parts of Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 but as of writing, DayZ in Steam install only the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2010.
This might be the cause of a crash of new installations of the game under Windows 8.1 because the crash message shown is only 'DayZ has stopped responding'
To get the true error message the user as to read the event manager which is not really well known