Hi, I'm new to mac and loving it

but i have a problem, last night i renamed the house icon in the finder window and after i restarted my desktop had changed and settings changed along with all my programs acting like they arn't installed. All the icons and programs are sitting in the mac hd under user. How do i fix this? and get my mac back to the way it was. I am using Panther on a iBook G4. Please help