I did some digging around and
this solution worked for me. Vibration is working now! Yay!!
I'm putting the solution below for your convenience:
"Make a backup of the joy.cpl file located in the System32 folder, then DELETE the original (because Windows 8 won't always allow you to REPLACE an existing file in that folder for some reason.) If you can't delete it just download and run unlocker. Then copy (NOT move) the joy.cpl file from the SysWOW64 folder into the System32 folder"