sound card problem??

Just recently the music in game cd's won't play, although the games run fine otherwise.
First off, I thought it may be the cdrom on its way out. But now windows media player gives an error "cannot play back audio stream..." "error 80040256". Checked out all of microsofts' suggestions, nothing has worked.
I tried a few different settings and managed to get some audio while running a game, but its very faint.
Now I'm getting "sound system initialization failed" errors on other games.
I'm at my wits end!!
Any thoughts?

AMD k6-2 350
160 MB
soundblaster 16
Ati rage fury
win 98

Possibly it's a dirty edge connector on the sound card. Try removing the card and cleaning the gold edge connector with an eraser or electrical cleaner.
Try setting PCI/PNP settings to manual and set IRQ 5 to legacy/isa if that doesn't work.
You may have a problem with directx media. Try reinstalling directx.