Thanks to those that have helped or just thought about this for me.
I have sussed the admin rights and have access to everything I need now, thanks. I still don't know why many of the icons don't show in the control panel or why some of those in the system32 directory fail to work. I can find and use, directly, the remaining utilities when I need to.
The machine hardware is as it always has been, the machine was bought new from Dell. I can't even begin to guess why the video drivers may be wrong or broken.
I have a number of PCs about the place, none of the others run Vista. Would I mess up the vista machine further if I copy some of the system32 .cpl files from other machines to replace the faulty ones currently in the Vista machine? I can get from win XP, win 7 or win 8.
Rans6......