Why are nose tests leaving orphaned PhantomJS processes on Windows 8?
What version of choco did you use to install PhantomJS (and what version of PhantomJS)? I believe we corrected this issue in most cases, but it is on newer versions of choco - and you need the shim to be generated in that newer version (which means install or upgrade, but we are adding a shim regen command).
I have some Python Selenium nose tests running on Windows 8 with PhantomJS. I installed Chutzpah (PhantomJS) via Chocolatey. 
When I run the nose tests, a "ShimGen" process appears and lots of "PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API (32 bit)" processes appear and use 50+mb of memory and never close. This causes a lot of stuck PhantomJS processes in memory. 
This eventually brings down the server.