Well whenever I have this problem (and I used to often on my old Dell laptop for some reason) I did basically the same thing as you, ie, followed the directions on the link you provided. But you sort of lost me with:

Quote:
Microsoft's knowledge base has a routine for re-creating the Show Desktop icon that writes the following to the "C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\QuickLaunch" directory:

I just open a blank notepad file, paste that bit of code, and save the file as Show Desktop.scf to my desktop. This creates the Show Desktop shortcut and I just move it back into my Quick Launch toolbar.

Sorry if you already tried this!