Help!

My PC has done something weird again! I was trying to upload a photo to Facebook when the whole thing froze. So I shut down Firefox and opened it again. It kept asking me for a profile, and when I clicked on default (cos I've never had any others) it told me that one was in use. It then created me one called default user, but when I opened that, all my bookmarks had gone (and I had a lot, believe me!) I've now upgraded to Firefox 2, I still have no bookmarks and I have three shortcut icons on my desktop which I can't delete.

I know the bookmarks are stored somewhere on the computer because I came across them by accident when I was looking for something else once - but where?

I'm having to use IE at the moment and I don't like it :-(

Any ideas?