Sorry guys, tried all of the above nothing worked. Starting to think the kids computer might want to meet my old friend, Mr Ball-Pien Hammer!!!

Just wait with the hammer, I believe you're a patient guy anyway
We're not all done yet:

Are all duplicates in device manager gone now?

If the drivers seem to be installed correctly (?) have you checked this:
In some rare cases, the Windows Audio service doesn't start by itself. Run services.msc and see if it's running or not.

When everything fails, have you considered buying a cheap standard PCI soundcard? This would be less fun than the hammer, but save you some nerves and bucks, too. Real SB-Live cards are on sell-out and don't cost a fortune. But this doesn't mean I wanna give up.

Tried all of the above, my friend. Still same deal. REALLY at a loss. Thanks for all the suggestions though, keep em coming.

You're welcome. Unfortunately, I'm a bit at my wits' end. I wish I could have a RL look at that machine. One more thing that may affect the outcome of an installation attempt: The right order of installing the OS, SPs, hotfixes, DirectX and drivers, in all variations. Also, have you tried to get it working without SP2 and the old drivers? (It should have worked in this configuration when it came out of the box) BIOS updates? Latest chipset drivers? Have you checked if XP mapped all PCI devices to a single, shared IRQ maybe? (Even though this is supposed to work fine, sometimes it doesn't.)

Here the Google search string I use:
realtek no sound "No Active Mixer Devices Available"

Almost all hits with this string sound pretty much like your problem. There are quite some people that struggled as much as you with their Realtek ALC650 chip and they had no luck with new drivers, too. Maybe you find something sounding familiar to you that we can't know yet. Anyway, maybe you find some more suggestions there. Or more reasons to swing the hammer... (No, please don't!)

buy a cheap pci card ,will solve all your problems

That was what started this whole mess in the beginning. The card I tried to install wouldn't work so I removed it, had problems, tried System Restore, didn't work, tried re-installing Windows, REALLY had problems after that. Specifically this one.

Ok, problem solved! Had to do it the hard way, but it worked and my computer is still MINE!

I re-installed windows and went DIRECTLY to Device Manager to check for conflicts or any other problems. Under "Sound, Video and Game Controllers" all was fine, but the heading above was "?Other Devices" with the sub heading ?!Multimeadia Audio Controller" with the error message "Drivers Not Installed" So, without doing any updates of any sort (SP2 is already integrated on the CD unfortunately) I IMMIDEATELY installed the newest driver directly from Gigabyte to the mystery "Other Device" and did a reboot. VOILA! Sound the instant the computer logged off. (As luck shoud have it the volume was set top high so I almost got stampeded by 4 VERY excited children. So, Lesson learned, rookie mistake, I've taken my lumps, next time I'll take my time and do it right. Thanks for all the help guys. GREATLY appreciated.

Wooo-hooo!! :mrgreen: I love to hear that! TinglyCourier:1 Hardware:0 ^^ And thanks for reporting your successful solution!

Go into your Control Panel and open Folder Options, under the View tab uncheck "Hide protected operating system files (recommended)", click Apply/OK. Now go into Windows Explorer(Not Internet Explorer) and go to C:\Windows\System32\dllcache folder and open it. Locate the sndvol32.exe file right click it,choose copy. Next go to the C:\Windows\System32 folder and open it. In the right pane right click an empty area and choose Paste. Now you should have your volume icon back.