Windows 10 - Can't alt-tab to desktop

system specs: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/P3o7EtSNHl1wfWnOh1BwyY8

For the past week or so, I haven't been able to alt-tab to the desktop; as in, it won't appear in the list of windows that I can switch to when holding down alt-tab.

Since I can't really pinpoint where the problem actually started, I'll describe relevant events leading up to it. Several days ago windows installed an "updated" driver for my 950M. I read that this particular driver (which is still installed as of today) was causing frame issues so I booted up gforce experience (I was lazy and didn't want to go to the website, but apparently that too had to update and required me to sign up with an account, go figure) to get the latest driver. Since I had a shitload of stuff open that I didn't want to close, I held off on restarting. A few days later (still haven't restarted) I left a game (World of Tanks) open (fullscreen) while I went to do something. When I came back about 20 mins later I noticed my laptop did not go into sleep mode like it should, rather the screen was dimmed somewhat and the computer itself was 'frozen'; i.e no input from my wired keyboard or mouse, and closing the laptop lid didn't put it to sleep. I was forced to do a hard shutdown (holding down the power button) in order to get it working again. As the desktop was loading, some sort of nvidia program (might have been gforce experience, but I have it disabled in startup options) popped up and froze before closing. I didn't think anything of it, but when I tried to open chrome from the desktop icon, I couldn't click it; actually I couldn't interact with anything at all. I did ctrl-alt-del, opened task manager, was able to interact with it fine, and I could interact with anything on the taskbar and start menu. but when I clicked the desktop, once again I was unable to click on anything, even the task manager window. I alt-tabbed to see if I could get task manager back in-focus, and found that it was the only option available (There should have been an option for desktop as well). I assumed at this point it might be a problem with windows explorer so I restarted that process, but there was no change. I then remembered the nvidia thing from earlier so I ended several nvidia processes that didn't appear to be essential (one of them had something "capture" something in its name) and suddenly I could interact with the desktop again. I still couldn't alt-tab between a program and desktop, but I pushed the problem out of my mind because I had things to do.

Now tonight the same thing happened again with the game causing my laptop to freeze instead of sleep, but after I restarted this time I could click the desktop normally but I still couldn't alt-tab between desktop and programs. This is very annoying, and I know I could work around it by doing windows key + d or whatever but that doesn't solve the problem.

Plshelp Thanks