Ksod Black Screen Of Death Win8.1

I began getting a plain black screen with only a mouse pointer appearing after booting my Win8.1 PC. I'll try to be as thorough as possible in what I'm seeing and what I've tried because the cause of this seems to vary based on my research so far.

I have two partitions on my hard drive, one for Win8.1 which is my primary OS and one for Win10 which I had installed while it was still a free upgrade but rarely use. I also have two Users for my Win8.1 partition, one for personal use and one for work use.

This started 2 days ago after I had attempted to remove several programs including all Visual C++ runtimes and Cuda for my Nvidia graphics card. I had to do this to install a program that required specific versions of Visual C++ and Cuda for installation on Win10. The installation failed because Cuda was not "compatible with your hardware" which is wrong because it was just installed on there before the installation so I gave up on the installation and booted back into my Win8.1 personal User account.

The screen displayed normal login options and displays of backgrounds until after I entered my User password. The screen was blank but I could see a mouse pointer. For the past month or so I've noticed a small CMD prompt dialog box popping up during this part of the boot-up process which quickly disappears again, sometimes minimizing itself to the bottom left corner of the screen for an instant before disappearing. I have no idea what it is, what it's for, or what is causing it but it started appearing long before the current issue and still appeared in this case. After this part of the boot-up process though, the screen remained blank.

I was able to get into Task Manager using Ctrl+Alt+Del and through there did some troubleshooting steps:
1. Verified that my Nvidia Graphics drivers were installed in Device Manager. My onboard display driver was not enabled so I booted into BIOS and enabled that as well.
2. Found no questionable startup or background processes.
3. Made sure the registry's HKLM>Softwate>Microsoft>WinNT>Shell setting was set to "explorer.exe"
4. Booted into Safe Mode (I think, because there was no way to tell since even Safe Mode had just a black screen) and ran "sfc /scannow" which reported no errors nor fixed the issue.
5. Got desperate and attempted a system restore but the only restore point was earlier the same day that the issue started and likely after the issue began. Did the restore point anyway with no favorable results.
6. At this point I feared that I wouldn't be able to get into my User account for work and would have to call off so I booted into my work User account and it booted up fine. Note that I haven't been getting the small CMD prompt window for this user account that I have been getting for my personal User account. I let the issue go until after work and the system under the work account seemed to run fine all night.
7. After work I thought maybe the Cuda had corrupted the display drivers somehow so did a clean install of the display drivers using my installation CDROM (had to navigate to the setup.exe on the CDROM using "Start new task" in Task Manager which worked) but the screen went completely blank and the installation window, task manager window, and cursor vanished and nothing would bring them back. After 15 minutes I restarted the system and this time I didn't even get the User Account login screen - just the Windows logo that shows when windows is starting. Same thing after several reboots. Did a system restore again and thankfully got back to the original situation.

Before I further complicate things, what else should I be looking at or checking? Any help would be appreciated!

 

Here's a new interesting development. If I open task manager and choose to run a new task and enter "EXPLORER.EXE" into the run dialog box, the desktop appears instantly, along with the file explorer window.

Any way to get this to open properly (I assume in the Windows shell) upon startup?

 

Great tips on Visual C++. I did attempt to follow all instructions including the DISM commands but the error still persists.
1. sfc /scannow revealed no issues.
2. Regedit already had "explorer.exe" listed in the correct location.
3. DISM gave the attached responses.
No system restore points prior to the issue. Any ideas on what else to attempt?

 

Yes.