missing sound and multimedia icon in control panel

[Todo]

okay, i'm working on the boss's wifes machine. the main problem i'm having is everytime i click on the sound and multimedia icon in control panel, i get a 'rundll32 caused an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll. so according to Microsoft, they said to look through the *.cpl files and when you click each one, the one that causes that message to pop up is the problem. they said to rename the file, which is 'mmsys.cpl'. i did that, and then restored the file using SFC in win98. I rebooted the machine,but NOW the sound and multimedia icon are missing!! now when i click on control panel the first time, i get 'explorer caused an invalid page fault in module kernel32.dll'..i can still access the control panel though. so basically i'm still missing the sound and multimedia icon. i followed the microsoft knowledge base,but it didn't work. anyone have any ideas. i can't format. it has all her work on it.

[Milenko]

Try a reinstall of windows (no format, just run setup again). Sounds like a file or link to a file is messed up. Overload might fix it and it usually doesn't hurt anyway.

[Todo]

thanx for the input. i was hoping i didn't have to install over on top. i know it shouldn't mess up their existing data. i was looking for suggestions. anything else i could try before reinstalling windows?

[Todo]

hey before i reinstall windows, anyone have any other ideas I might be able to do to get back the sound and multimedia icon in control panel. i tried replacing that corrupted file,but didn't seem to work.

[MacGyver]

Can you double click on the CPL file in the Windows system directory to get it running?

:/

[n8dawg]

go into safe mode and rip out the sound drivers in device manager the go back into windows and reinstall sound drives

[LPetrarca]

Try this.

To speed up the process, copy all the cabfiles from your Win98 CD to their own folder on your hard drive.

Shut down your machine.

Physically remove all the effected hardware.

Restart the machine.

In the Add/Remove programs of Control Panel, click on the Windows Setup tab.

Uncheck the Multimedia box to remove multimedia support.

Follow the prompts to restart your machine. If prompted for the Win98 CD, just point it to the path where you copied your cabfiles.

Restart.

Reinstall the multimedia components you just uninstalled. Again, when prompted for the Win98 CD, point it to the path where the cabfiles live.

Restart.

Shut down the machine.

Reinstall the hardware devices, one at a time.

Now see if it works!

[Todo]

Okay, problem fixed! heres what I did in case others have the same problem. basically there are 2 steps.
1.) Go to system.ini and insert the line
'drivers=mmsystem.dll'. Save it then reboot the machine. That gave me the volume icon in the system tray. I was still missing the sound and multimedia icon, so...
2.) I copied the 'mmsys.cpl' file from another machine and put it in the \windows\system directory. I got back the sound and multimedia icon and i've got sound now!!

its seems the FIRST step was pretty important, because I just tried the 2nd step, but it didn't work. I found this in the M$ knowledge base. Q138835