Windows 8 loaded to black screen

Windows 8 loaded to black screen

Windows 8 booted, I got the "logging in" circular progress thingy, then
loaded to a black screen, with a moving cursor. I was confused since the
start screen did not appear. I cannot windows+R, but I could ctrl+alt+del
and then open task manager. I used "run a command" in the task manager to
run cmd.exe (explorer.exe did not load) and can run programs from either
of those places. I could print screen and paste it into paint, then open
chrome and load it to imgur here: http://i.imgur.com/8UJvKTX.png and since
this opened Paint, and was able to use save and load dialogs even though
explorer.exe did not load.
I can alt-tab but it looks like an older style of dialog box, like Aero is
off.
I opened control panel fine.
Right clicking a task manager entry lets me show location, opening an
explorer window.
The windows key does nothing.
On the bright side, my passive cpu usage and memory usage are very very low.
I was just booted fine in Linux
I have Windows on an SSD, with EasyBCD letting me choose windows or linux
(which is on a hard drive) and that works fine.
How do I get my desktop back? I'm going to try turning it off and on again
but posted this first because I figured I should document it while it was
up.
EDIT: I logged out through ctrl+alt+del and logged back in, no go.
EDIT2: Reboot fixed it. Can someone explain to me what happened is my
question now? Some weird things happened, too. SkyDrive is refusing to
accept my SkyDrive folder location, saying it needs to reconfigure, though
the folder is right there. Steam forgot my user/pass but kept SteamGuard.
Oh, also last time I was in Linux (immediately before the weird boot) I
ran a SMART scan of both the SSD windows is on and the HDD hooked up to
it. Everything seemed fine. Last time I ran memtest86+, roughly 3-4 months
ago, everything was fine and I haven't changed hardware since then.
The other weird thing recently is on occasional boots it won't recognize
my wifi card and i have to physically reseat it to get it to load.