My computer:
IBM ThinkPad X31 laptop running XP Pro SP2 DirectX 9.0c
Motherboard: IBM 2884JUU Intel Odem i855PM Intel 8280DBM ICH4-M
Sound: AD1981B chipset SoundMax Integrated Audio

So I decide to clean a few things off of my system, and I used add/remove programs to remove four programs: Civilization III, Everquest II Trial of the Isle, Crystal Reports, and Bloomba.

After that, no sound. Control Panel | Sounds and Audio Devices says "No audio device." Clicking on the Control Panel | SoundMax icon simply does nothing (no applet appears.)

Woops, I think. I deleted something I shouldn't have. No problem, I think. I'll just uninstall the sound drivers and install them again. Strange, though -- I can no longer find anything like a sound card in my device manager. I do manage to uninstall SoundMax through add/remove programs. I reboot. Then I try to reinstall the sound driver from IBM:

Audio Driver 5.12.01.5410
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...cid=MIGR-61604

I get the ugly SoundMax BMP screen and it goes okay until the end: "Driver not found! Reboot your system, then run this setup again." There seems to be no way around this message. I have tried everything I can think of and everything I can find on this board and I am at the end of my rope.

Symptoms:
- No sound devices in device manager except Audio Codecs, Legacy Video Capture Devices, and Video Codecs.
- No audio device in Control Panel | Sounds and Audio Devices
- Sound card driver won't install due to above error.


Things I've tried:
0. Do what it says on the error message -- reboot and try again several times. No luck.

1. Use system restore to rollback to the last save point. No luck. This does nothing.

2. reboot to safe mode and uninstall everything under audio (not much there though) and wait for windows to detect new hardware: no new hardware ever detected. Try installing sound driver again. Same error.

3. install directly with .inf instead of setup.exe -- inf doesn't appear on select list.

4. install a few soundmax driver packages suggested different places on this board. same "driver not found!" problem with every package.

5. install every IBM driver package that looks like it has anything to do with motherboard chipsets. done and all are up to date.

6. install a few intel reference packages for motherboard chipsets. just casting around blindly at this point. they all install fine and don't do anything.

7. look for enable/disable audio option in BIOS so that I can toggle it a few times. I can't find any option for audio in ThinkPad BIOS. No likely candidates under other menus either (e.g., PCI).

8. run a variety of diagnostic programs (Everest, PC Doctor) -- they all just say that no sound card is installed.

9. run dxdiag -- says everything is OK but there is no sound card. Updated DirectX to 9.0c. Install eems to work but does not address the problem.

I would say the sound card has failed except that I seem to have caused all of this with the uninstall. Please help! I am running out of things to try and I have poured time into this monster. I miss my sound!

Begging,
Christian