Unresponsive system but mouse still moves; even after restart

I was transferring a few files over my LAN wirelessly via file sharing to another macbook (B) when that macbook was closed and caused a disconnect. My macbook (A) has experienced issues since this disconnect. Even after restarts and resetting the pram, my system is unresponsive. The mouse will move but I cannot open applications, folders, files, or even the menu. It is as if my mouse is moving over top a picture of the desktop. I did manage to click and highlight my HD icon once but as soon as I did, the color wheel showed up and never stopped. My hard drive has over 10GB of space free. I was able to do a target disk boot and test the drive and its ok according to disk utility. Any ideas about what I could do would be greatly appreciated...preferably without wiping the hard drive.

The first issue occurred while I was transferring large files from one computer to another via afp file sharing over my wireless network. In the middle of this transfer, someone closed the receiving macbook. The macbook sending the files didn't respond well after this. It would intermittently freeze without a linked resource draining process. I believe the first occurrence was when I tried to right click a file that had been interrupted during transfer. I forced a restart, used the killall Finder command in terminal thinking that it might still be trying to transfer the file to a ghost in some way...even though that didn't make sense. I was able to verify and repair the external drive the file was on. After doing this and resetting the PRAM, it was back to normal for a little while. After a bit of normal activity (nothing strenuous), it began to freeze again. I tried the same steps and also booted in target disk mode so I could use the other macbook to run diagnostics. The drive got repaired. I attempted to restart the affected macbook but I couldn't do anymore than one thing and the never-ending colorwheel would appear. That one thing could be a single click on a file or an attempt of opening an application. After that I turned to this discussion forum after already impatiently attempting to safe mode boot and repair disk permissions. I tried this again with patience after your suggestion. It worked for a few hours and I was able to surf the web once more and go about the usual. I pulled up dashboard and pressed command+ to bring up the list of widgets and it froze on me again. I attempted previous steps again after restarting but there has been no difference in response. Throughout the entirety of this experience, there have been no error messages. Also, there's no difference in behavior if I disconnect everything but the power cable.
Sorry for the lengthy post but hopefully it will be helpful.
Message was edited by: AG_Jazz

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