Glad to hear you have it working.
I wouldn't worry about the firmware on your radio. There really isn't any changes that can be made to the radio itself. Only changes are in different versions of chirp's daily build.
There is a recovery firmware from erratic behavior and tried it once on a radio that wouldn't keep a programmed frequency on channel 000. It didn't help. Just deleted that channel and started from ch. 1.
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As long as you have the radio working and the version of CHIRP you have is working on Windows 8, I would just work with what you got.
Here is how to disable transmitter on monitor only frequencies.
This can be done using the CHIRP software.
Enter the desired receive frequency.
In the Duplex Field, select SPLIT
In the Offset Field, enter 0.0
000.000 will display when transmitter is keyed. No RF is generated.
Remember this is when you are editing a channel or you can highlight a channel and select edit.
Once the channels are uploaded to the radio the only way to edit them again is either by CHIRP or by deleting the channel and manually entering it. Too bad we can't manually enter names of channels also.