Windows 7 - Desktop Icons and the entire taskbar has dissapeared

Basically, all of the icons on my desktop, as well as my entire taskbar, including the windows icon, have disappeared.
It happened about 20 minutes ago, when I forced firefox to close via task manager. After I hit End Process, the icons and my taskbar dissapeared.
I can't right-click my desktop either. However, my desktop background, as well as the toolbar on the top is still there, and all of my programs as well as explorer are accessible. I've done one cold restart, and nothing changed.
I've gone into the control panel, but I couldn't access anything associated to the task bar, and my windows key does not work as well.

does anybody know what's going on?

i dont know if this will help but try using system restore:

System Restore

Open task manager and end the process explorer.exe, it should restart itself.

If, however, explorer.exe is not there, click File > New Task, and type explorer.exe

Let me know if it works!

click ctrl+shift+del and end explorer.exe process(if its there)

then click File
new process and type explorer.exe
then ok

hopefully your taskbar and everything else will reappear

oh my goodness! Thank eveyone who answered here so much. the same thing had just happened to me and i was freaking out. if it werent for you guys i would have wound up taking my computer to a repair shop.