Corrupt Audio Subsystem?

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Guest

When visiting the Windows Update website last night, I noticed an updated driver for my Creative SoundBlaster PCI 128 sound card was posted. I tried to download and install the driver. The driver (only 44KB) downloaded fine, but during the install the computer hard locked. I lost all mouse and keyboard input, and after several minutes of trying to free the computer up nicely, I was forced to press "reset." When the computer rebooted the automatic disk check ran. There were several truncated files (including .inf files) that were saved as lost chains. When I got back to the desktop, I had no audio and there were yellow exclamation points on my CD/DVD drive, my CD-RW drive and my sound card. I removed these devices from device manager and let the "Add/Remove Hardware" wizard attempt to re-install them. The two CD drives were re-installed successfully, but when the wizard attempted to load the drivers for the sound card, the computer hard locked again. I was again forced to reset. When the computer rebooted it again ran disk check, but no errors were detected. When I got back to the desktop, the sound card was auto-detected by plug and play. This time the drivers were successfully installed. However, I had no audio. Device manager claims that the device is present, working normally and that there are no conflicts, but clicking the "Sound and Multimedia" icon in control panel shows "No Devices." Checking the properties of the sound card shows "the driver is enabled but not started." I have completely removed and reinstalled the SoundBlaster software twice and have been unable to restore the audio. It seems to me that whatever the audio drivers depend on to start them (the audio subsystem?) is either corrupt or not starting for some reason. Is there any way to fix this without reloading the operating system?
 
Exactly the same problem I had. I use Soundblaster PCI
128's on three computers. They worked fine until I
stupidly allowed Microsoft Update to zap in a newer
driver. NOTHING sound-wise worked after that. I had
to pull the sound cards out; remove the drivers from the
hardware list; re-boot the computers; and then re-install
the sound cards and let WinXP re-detect them and install
the ORIGINAL drivers (which worked perfectly).

Soundblaster (Creative Labs) was of NO help as they
insisted
that their "new" drivers worked just fine.....

You micht have to try my solution.
 
I'll try that. I've never removed drivers from the hardware list, but I can probably figure it out. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
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