Not a dumb question at all. However we really cannot help you here as those icons will appear as you install all the programs you lost when the hard drive was replaced.

This will likely take you a while because will not realise a program is missing untill you try to use it and find it is not there. Programs you may have bought can be installed from the original CD or DVD, free programs can be searched for on the net and installed.

Be absolutely sure that you have you safety programs installed to protect against the bad guys before doing anything else.

If you are saying that your harddrive died, a new one was installed and the operating system was also re-installed by someone, then you would have to reload those programs that you had before with the shortcut (icons)..Which icons are you looking to retrieve

When you lost your hard drive, you lost everything on it. When the technician put a new one in, that would involve simply putting the operating system on it so your computer can function. Unless you gave the technician a restore disk that had some other stuff on it, the tech would typically not be re-installing your programs or anything else, hence no icons...the re-installs are your job. Also, I hope you were not storing anything irreplaceable (photos, documents, etc.) on your old hard drive without having backed it up elsewhere, because all of that stuff is gone, too.

Putting in a new hard drive is like giving someone a brain transplant using a brand new brain...there's a lot of room to store new info, but there aren't any old memories.