At the old lawfirm, they used to use policies to remove icons and program menu items from the luser's workstations. Depending on their security, we could turn off the control panel, hide the printers settings, etc so they wouldn't hose them up.

If you are missing your control panel, your printer settings, and your Run command from your Start bar, talk to your Network Administrator and tell him/her to turn off your Peon-Access in policies. Or you could just remove the policies program, if you can still somehow access the Add/Remove programs, appwiz.cpl I think is the file it needs, unless a login script somehow deletes it?