Booting always goes to desktop then freezes

My laptop freezes during booting and always in the same manner. The system starts normally, giving me the F2 and F8 options. Afterward the system will be dark for a good 2+ minutes and then load the desktop background image in low resolution. The mouse cursor is also available and active. However, no folders are visible and right-click does not work. In other words, I cannot interact with desktop in any way.

I have gone through safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, repair mode, last known good configuration, and debugging mode. In every case the system immediately goes dark until the desktop background loads as described above. I am out of ideas and would appreciate any advice you can give. Thanks.

Try booting to an installation disk and running the startup repair options.
If these fail, try opening the cmd prompt from the repair options, and running sfc /scannow /offbootdir=X: /offwindir=X:
Just replace "X" with your drive letter (in the recovery environment, it is usually D)