Black Screen of Death, Cant Access Desktop, errors 0xc0000185

Hey All,

Ive been searching on the net since Friday and found a variety of "solutions", but none of them have worked... Here's my issue:

Back when it was released, I installed Windows 8 preview on a new partition of my Windows 7 laptop. Ive been switching back and forth no problem, but about a month ago when trying to log in, I typed in my password and was stuck at the black screen with a cursor. After a few restarts and startup repairs it sorted itself out.

Now, it's happened again, but this time, startup repair isn't doing the trick. It reports no OS found in the error.

I am dual booting between 7 and 8, and in trying to login to 7, typing my password, it again brings me to the black screen with a cursor. I cannot press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reach the task manager and manually start explorer.exe, and same thing happens in safe mode.

I have checked my C drive and saw there were backups of my explorer.exe, so I tried to switch them up with the current one. At one point, I could get to my desktop and see all of my taskbar icons, however hovering over the taskbar would show a loading cursor and I could not open anything. Restarting again brought me back to the black screen.

I have tried fixboot, fixmbr, BCD editor, etc, to no avail. I have also tried "last known good configuration", system restore (which reports no restore points...) and checking the registry to verify explorer.exe is the only listing in the Shell file.

Also, virus scan MBAM and others: No viruses.

Errors: At one point with the black screen, I let it sit, and a few errors came up after an hour or so... dwm.exe unable to start correctly error 0xc000185, explorer.exe unable to start correctly error 0xc000185, then when pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, "Failure to display security and shut down options". In viewing one of the error details, it reported problem event name InPageCoFire, damaged file name propsys.dll. I replaced that file and a clean one and no change.

Right now I am using Windows 8 boot. I can see all of my files are still in the Windows 7 partition.

Does anyone have any more ideas?