Thank you, that actually steers me in the correct direction, ironically i didn't even notice that the explorer shell toolbar is also missing, so this must be something else...weird that it's like this on three computers, i'll just do a clean install and see what happens, thanks for the help.
EDIT: Nevermind, i know exactly what i did. I recently disabled the addons in IE (which i don't use but forgot that windows explorer is in itself IE) and that's what caused the issue. This was my fault. re-enabled classic shell add-on in IE and all is well again. Thanks for your time.