Not really - it was just a sort of 'oh, where's that gone?' kind of moment and I can't narrow it down to a particular day!
I have a program installed caled Vista Manager, which allows you to restore defaults - this seemed to work, however, I am a victim of that other irritant where Windows explorer decides to restart randomly - once again, I cannot stop this happening (after visiting various forums)- when it does restart, the icons have gone again.
Also, when i try to start vista manager back up to repeat the process, it says it is already running and to click the icon in the notification area to open it - no surprises, it's one of the ones that has gone missing so can do nothing.
When I look at running processes in task manager, it's not there so I can't even close it, so a reboot is the only option, and so the loop starts all over again.