Originally Posted by NooNoo
OK the fact that you have devices installed correctly in device manager but nothing in the multimedia section tells me this is definitely a WDM driver snafu...
Try this please.
Boot to safe mode. Remove any and ALL devices to do with sound (yes including mp401 but just disable the wave device for a voice modem.) Shutdown, restart and immediately go into bios and disable the onboard sound. Make sure you check all the bios options, the legacy sound is often listed separately to the ac97. Some boards even have a jumper to disable the onboard sound. You need to get the onboard sound completely disabled.
Boot to normal mode see if it detects a new sound card, if it doesn't good. Boot to safe mode and track down and rename the files that the drivers installed.... especially the inf file. Check there are no backup copies sitting in any other directory.
Check the registry enum key for any pci sound devices, if they are there, delete just those devices.
Reboot to normal mode and make sure all is well. Unzip the VXD drivers to a directory that can easily be found - such as c:\sound. Shut down. Re enable the sound device(s) in bios. Boot to normal mode and direct windows to use the c:\sound directory.
Pray. :)