Crash seemed to damage windows

This was on win7 while running crossfire, itunes, firefox, steam, avast AV and the comodo firewall.

I was playing crossfire normally in hero mode and I had a graphical freeze, mouse pointer became unstuck so was visible on my other screen. I tried ctrl-alt-delete to open task manager but nothing happened, so I used the power button to hard restart.

This is where it gets odd; upon restart and reaching desktop programs will not run, this includes antivirus, internet browser and task manager. No error messages but won't open. So I boot into safe mode and try a system restore a day earlier. When I restart everything's fine until I hit desktop which has a mouse pointer but is otherwise completely black.

Freaked out, I boot back into safe mode and uninstall crossfire since it originally caused this issue (should probably have done this first but whatever). Now when I boot I have my desktop back but still no programs will run. I'm copying my files off the computer in preparation for a format when BOOM, 10 minutes later everything starts working again.

So FYI this game can give windows some serious hiccups. I'm sure it's just a freak crash but....it's worrying nonetheless. Not sure I'm interested in reinstalling.