Weirdest Sound Problem Ever...

r3loaded

r3loaded

r3loaded

Associate
Joined
20 Mar 2006
Posts
383
Location
Manchester, UK
Before you start saying "check your speakers are connected", "check the volume is turned up" and "upgrade your drivers", please read through this very strange tale of mine....

Hardware Info - Dell Dimension 4550 with:
P4 3.06Ghz Northwood with HT
1GB PC-2700 DDR RAM
120GB Hitachi Hard Drive
nVidia GeForce FX 5500 128MB
Sound Blaster Live! Value
Black Gold Digital TV Tuner Card
Samsung 16x/48x DVD-ROM Drive
NEC ND-1100A DVD+RW Drive

One day, I decided to install Acronis TrueImage 9. It installed fine, but when I rebooted, I started getting strange DCOM and driver errors. On another reboot, Windows decided to blue screen every time I booted. I then went to the F8 menu and picked Last Known Good Configuration as I believed there were issues with drivers. XP booted fine.

The driver problems were not fixed of course, so I first uninstalled TrueImage, backed up the hardware profile and then uninstalled all of my drivers. I then rebooted again and proceeded to install all of my drivers. They all installed fine (or so Device Manager told me).

The problem that now occured was that though the drivers for the Sound Blaster Live sound card were all loaded correctly and were up to date in Device Manager, the rest of Windows cannot find it. In Sounds and Audio Devices in Control Panel, it simply says "No Audio Device". I then proceeded to attempt reinstallation of the drivers in several different manners (Creative Installer, inf file installation, Device Manager driver installation) but still the problem persisted. I then tried uninstalling the driver, shutting down and removing the sound card and then restarting and shutting down and re-inserting the card. I also tried different PCI slots, but though the drivers would load correctly, Windows would not find the sound card.

Thinking that my card had somehow been fried, I switched over to the mobo's integrated SoundMAX sound chip. Again, I loaded its drivers, which installed correctly, rebooted and......Windows still couldn't find it! The Sounds and Audio Devices applet still shows "No Audio Device".

I now think that the problem must reside in Windows XP's sound sub-system as the drivers are definitley working properly, but I don't have a clue on how to go about resetting/configuring it. This is easily the weirdest problem I've ever encountered. Reinstalling Windows is the only thing I can think of, but I'm really not in the mood for that.

Any comments welcome :)
 
Regmon not helped...

Hey, could you tell me which driver needs reinstalling for the audio control panel applet? I've tried RegMon and there's simply too much information to wade through to find out anything. Also tried Googling for an hour - it hasn't turned up anything that relates to this specific problem.
 
Hey again, checked this section of the registry, all seems ok. I even compared it to my laptop, pretty much no difference.

I dug deeper however and found this out: In Device Manager, I double-clicked on my sound card that was listed and apparently working normally (SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio in this instance). I then selected the Properties tab and under Audio Devices, I double-clicked the SoundMAX icon again. The status line says "Driver is enabled but has not been started". The "Use audio feature on this device" radio button has been selected. The same occurs for the MIDI function and the Mixer function.

So, there I have it. All Windows sound drivers installed correctly, but they're not started. Question is: how do I get them started and running? I know how to start and stop drivers for certain software (e.g. VMware, antivirus) but there does not seem to be a similar interface for sound drivers (unless it's hidden somewhere).
 
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