Arrrgh .. no wonder you couldn't follow the links .. they've been archived somewhere & I couldn't get 'em to work either ! :rolleyes: .. so time for a bit of lateral thinking ..
That info then lets me/us find the driver for that
here @ VIA Arena (but its one of them 'dumb' .asp generated pages so I can't give you a direct link !) - once you get to that page, choose your o/s (98SE here), then 'audio', then 'VIA AC97 codec incorporated into VT82C686B South Bridge ', that'll finally link you to a driver, that'll hopefully work as it ought !
As to the bios question, lets see how this goes first, it all did work, so it should still once we've given it back the right drivers (I only suggested bios update earlier because of what you originally told us apparently 'wrongly') .
One further thing though .. earlier you made mention of some 'soundblaster' drivers - so you don't seem to have one of them either, so if you have anything related to that uninstall it (showing in add/remove programs?) also.