Windows 7 system icons problems

Hello, I recently reformatted my computer and followed the manufacturer's install order for the drivers and fully updated windows (except SP1, which is installing right now). However, I noticed that the sound icon was not showing up on my taskbar. I did double check that all sound drivers were installed, and that sound does come out of all my speaker outputs yet windows still recognized it as "not in use". I even tried checking turning on/off system tray icons as well as doing a registry check through cmd to find any errors yet it still shows up as 'grayed out' on 'turn on/off system tray icons' window, and doesn't show up on the taskbar.

Any ideas? It began happening last night where upon startup I noticed it was missing. I tried looking for an answer, but shortly gave up. When I changed my start orb, explorer.exe restarted to show the new start orb and the sound icon was now showing. Today, when I turned on my computer the icon is missing again.

 

A little info about your hardware will definitely help people direct you in the right way to fix it.

 

So the update to Windows 7 SP1 finished, and upon restarting the OS all four icons appeared on my taskbar.

I have an M11XR2.

Now that I have SP1 installed, I'm going to finish installing all my other programs and files. I'm also going to replace ExplorerFrame.dll & shell32.dll.

Upon changing those two files provided from APPOWS2010, some of my functions stopped working (such as google chrome not being able to "show file in folder location" for downloads, and upon replacing shell32.dll many of my programs wouldn't be able to load.