Woo! it worked, well, a combination of uninstalling both internet explorer, and windows media player, and winamp, and then getting them all installed again in the right order (except IE), now the icons are showing up just fine

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As for HTML files i'll just keep playing about until they reappear, going to uninstall firefox while IE is still uninstalled then reinstall IE and then firefox which should solve it. just another bug, still not entirely sure whether it was to do with media player or IE though.
Thanks alot to everyone who gave me help.
Ben