My parents in law had a problem with their machine where they had lost all the icons on their desktop. Puzzled I looked everywhere for them and could not find them, not even in the recycled folder. So naturally my next stop was Google to see if anyone else had had this problem and kept on coming up with the same old things

"Run a virus scanner and search for viruses"

"Is your screen resolution correct"

"It happened to me and sadly I found no solution to it so used other programs from the task manager"

Solution

Funny enough the solution was incredibly simple. Right click on your desktop on the menu that appears click on "Arrange Icons" then hover down the second menu that appears and ensure the option "Show desktop icons" is ticked and like magic they reappeared!