I have LXDE loaded on microcore / xvesa. I don't get the gear icons for cpanel or appbrowser on the desktop. Also when I mount an application like opera I don't see any menu entry or desktop icon.
Missing desktop icons: they are there with TC, will check MC. Do you see the 'My Documents' and 'exit' items? Are appbrowser and cpanel listed in the menu?
LXDE and Xfce4 (like Gnome and Opera) are using the standard freedesktop.org menu specification. If an extension provides the menu file in /usr/local/share/applications like lxtask, thunderbird, filezilla, isomaster, wifi-radar, ... it appears in the menu, otherwise not. You may run tc2freedesktop command to create menu files based on wbar menu automatically.
Desktop items never created automatically, you have to add them. Most convenient method is mouse right click in the menu on the item, it will offer 'Add to desktop'. Other sulution is to create a symlink in ~/Desktop to the menu spec in /usr/local/share/applications