Hello Passepartout,
If you recently performed an upgrade you can try digging out your old shortcuts in the windows.old folder in the c:\
You can take a look here to see where those shortcuts are traditionally stored. You should be able to dig them out of the location such as C:\windows.old\Users\(YourUsername)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
You will have to show hidden files and folders when browsing to this data