Interestingly enough, this issue was caused by my SD card reader. The card reader came with my NZXT case and I never used it until recently. I left an SD card in the slot and never thought anything of it. Well in diagnosing this issue, I saw the "Safely remove hardware" icon in the bottom right. It said the issue was with my SD card reader, so I clicked remove and took out my SD card and now my PC both restarts AND the desktop refresh works perfectly.
Keep this in mind if you are having a similar issue. See if you have any hardware that is causing an issue. Maybe load up device manager and have a look.