Windows 7 Help with the home screen

By home screen, I assume you are talking about your desktop. I can only guess that what you are looking for is some type of proprietary icon dock. I know dell and acer and several other computer manufacturers use them and they are generally loaded from your startup programs folder and if you've rebooted and the icon bar hasn't reappeared then perhaps you can find it in your programs list look for something called dell dock or icon menu or something like that, if you find it launch it and make sure that you have what you want, and there is generally a little wrench looking icon in the corner of it somewhere that you can use to determine it's startup display option, if not just copy and past the launcher into your startup menu.