Help! Soft key disappeared?

[yahknow1]

Thanks Coz,
I had only tried turning the phone off then back on. After reading your suggestion I tried pulling the battery, STILL no icons except for the Application icon.. I'm able to get to all the settings through that icon. I'm using Samsung' Touchwiz I think is what it's called?

I haven't done a reset on the phone, I'm sure that would get the keys back but it would wipe a lot of data too, even with a backup...I'd like to leave that as a last resort, plus I'm going to root the phone soon (like I was thinking about doing it tomorrow) so if I absolutely can't get it back to normal it's not the end of the world! Hope that's enough info, this is just very frustrating, I can't for the life of me figure out how this could have happened?