XP/SoundMAX; audio gone. Sound familiar?
Hello, all. I'm stuck with a similar problem to many people here, which I'll try to explain as succinctly as I can.
I have an AOpen P4, I'm running XP, and I have a SoundMax audio card. My audio until now has been fine (a bit glitchy, but nothing serious, just graphics buzz and mild function crackle) for two years. A few days ago, it just quit. No program audio, no system sounds, no nothin'.
It isn't the speakers. It isn't the jack, since I still get a line buzz and some of the aforementioned noise. The card says it's functioning properly, same with the drivers. I checked through the "manage" function as mentioned on another thread, and it's set for automatic and is started. The only thing I can think of to try is reinstalling the drivers/installing new drivers, but I don't want to take that step yet, in case it's something else.
I opened up under another user profile to see if it was the computer or just my personal account -- nobody else uses it, so nothing was deleted or removed without my knowledge, unless it was an internet attack of some sort, which seems unlikely -- and had the same problem, but I got an error message this time, which said I had a bad DirectSound driver, and gave me error code 80070057. So I downloaded DirectX 9, just in case that was the problem. It wasn't, obviously.
Here's the complicating factor; before I noticed the sound was out, I removed some old programs I didn't use anymore that were just taking up space, like old versions of Illustrator, games I didn't play anymore, things like that, and threw out a few files that were just sitting around dormant. I was careful about what I junked, and if in doubt, I kept it around. But I hadn't used the sound yet that day, so I don't know if the sound had already cut out by that point, or if something I removed caused the problem. I restored the files from the recycle bin, which didn't help. It's hard to imagine that one of the programs I removed had a key component I needed for sound, but I suppose it's possible.
(One more side note; after this happened, I had trouble running SimCity 4 the first two or three times I tried. After checking the audio on the other user account and returning to my usual one, it was okay again.)
Sorry for the longwindedness of this post, but I figured I might as well describe it thoroughly right up front. 75% of what I do on my computer involves mixing audio, so this is driving me nuts, and I'm going through serious creative withdrawal, so I'm anxious to get this sorted. I'd be grateful for any advice anyone can offer.
