Nothing special, except if it is critical that the development environment works all the time
Well, that't true when he's at work, not at home, unless he's supposed to work at home too, and this would make for a good Dilbert link...
I've done a lot of googling the last week and haven't turned up anything
Seriously???
I want to avoid affecting the other users profiles
By definition different profiles exist to not affect each other.
I wouldn't be able to use my desktop for my other purposes like the music editing
Why? I'll assume you're talking about hardware limits.
Would it help to set up all these tools under a different account on the same Win 8.1 install? Or should I virtualize my development environment (and how?)
Here it seems like you think that adding another user or a VM would magically double your hardware resources.
I hope you poorly wrote your post, or you'd better figure out those basic things before you want to be a programmer!
They cant legally bill you for something you did not order.
Just wait for the next patent!
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking. -- Jerome Lettvin