interesting problem....

[Sadclown]

Hey guys,

Well, after working perfectly for the last month or so my sound card has suddenly taken a turn for the odd. for some reason it's totally removed itself from my PC.

I know windows knows it's there because when you log on/off the cheesy little sound FX still play, and I can still play CD's thru the CD-ROM, however...

A. When I go into Device Manager it says that it can't detect an audio device or there is none installed.

B. There's no sound whatsoever in any game.

i figure it's probably a driver prob, and I haven't had time yet to re-install them, but it's weird, because I haven't changed anything on the PC at all. no uninstalls or installs. Nuttin'.

Just weird:? :? :?

try this (assuming you are using win9x or me)
if the driver problem doesnt work (upgrading to a newer driver), go into safe mode and remove the sound card from device manager (it will show up in safe mode along with everything else you may have installed in the past that has been removed from the system) then reboot system and it should detect the sound card, have the drivers ready also to install, if that does not work, then shutdown system and remove the card from the current slot and replace it into another slot and reboot system, if it still doesnt detect the card, then try the card in another system to rule out the cards possibility of being bad, if it works in another system, then you may have to manually remove the vxd's and 16 bit dll's from the registry along with all entries referencing to the card as well (to get a fresh clean start as if it was being installed the very first time) to do this, write down the property detail drivers for each device emulated on the sound card (device manager) and remove those keys in the registry, then remove the devices detected from device manager in safe mode (similiar to above, but more thorough) also remove or rename the files located from the detailed property sheet (device manager, file info), also check the system.ini for any references to the sound card, in this manner, you are completely removing all references to the sound card and the associated drivers and files to it from the registry and the system (device manager is an easier way to remove them from the registry) i have run into this problem once before and the key solution for me was to remove all references via the registry, rename the files linked to it (.bak) and loaded up the updated drivers on the disk for installation, rebooted the machine and viola, detection possible. the cause to my dilemma of the sound card suddenly disappearing was a fault in the registry, too many areas in the registry and too complex to repair, so it was easier this way. i hope this helped in some way, as most likely, you are probably using windows XP and i know very little about that OS as far as this goes, i prefer win98se overall, 99% of software supports this os and has been well seeded to work with it without bugs and complications.

[Sadclown]

Yeah, I'm using XP. but I fixed it today, the same way you described. I removed every reference to the card and then reinstalled. Works fine now. I just don't have a clue what caused it to go away in the first place.:?

usually its a foul-up in the registry