Some Desktop Icons Missing

my system is a dell desktop running windows 7 64-bit home premium. i have 8 gb ram, and a 2.8 ghz intel core i7 processor. i was fooling around with windows backup and restore and i created a new user account. i rebooted and noticed that in my primary user account, the one i always use (not the new one), a good portion of my desktop icons had disappeared. i also noticed that in the new account i created, only 1 of the many desktop icons displayed. most, if not all, of the disappeared icons are shortcuts to applications such as vmware, itunes, Internet downloader, etc. but these applications are still there within the start menu under "all programs". unfortunately, i'm not sure exactly how long the missing icons have been gone. i just noticed the problem a few days ago.all the previous versions of my desktop folder, dating back to last july, seem to contain only the shortcuts that display now, not the missing icons, and i'm pretty sure that all the icons were present back then. it doesn't make sense. how could all the icons display if they weren't in the desktop folder to begin with? i have no idea of how i could have deleted only some of the shortcuts either. i realize i could just recreate the shortcuts on the desktop, but something weird happened here, and i'd like to know what it is. also, there is one icon that displays that isn't in the desktop folder but is in the "links" folder. it's a dvd-making application called corel windvd 2010.

i tried rebuilding the icon cache and it didn't bring back the missing icons. all it did was change my corel video studio application icon from a generic one to the little camera logo like it's supposed to be. there are still no icons displayed on the desktop of the new user account that i created, except for the corel windvd 2010 one and a gadget for my corel video studio pro x application (it's a movie editing software package). strangely, the gadget does appear in the new user account and so does the corel windvd 2010 icon.i have a screenshot of my desktop from before the icons disappeared and from that i can see that about 18 icons disappeared. furthermore, the default desktop folder doesn't contain any shortcuts either, which probably explains why no icons appear in the new account i created. shouldn't the default desktop folder contain the shortcuts?i tried running a microsoft utility that's supposed to fix broken desktop shortcuts but that didn't fix the problem. are there any other locations that might contain the missing icons other than just the "desktop" and "links" folders? perhaps within the registry or something?