Black screen of death with cursor

I had a black screen of death in win 7. That is where windows gets to the point I think where it tries to load the shell. I found a fix on the internet and when I rebooted it got to the same point so I left it alone and it finally came up a hour later, but everything was at a snails pace to open and somethings did not open. I ran the cmd line "sfc /scannow" and it said it fixed some issues, but nothing is better?
I also tried deleting the video card in safe mode and adding new video drivers.
Anyone know how to fix this without fresh install?
Thanks in advance!