You have a virus it's using your audio device. to get your audio back short term, goto cotrolpanel/speech and audio devices/sound and audio devices/, if the page is grayed out this is why no audio. select the hardware tab and Dblcik the audio device "97""crystal" whatever your machine uses,goto the properties tab dblclik each item and disable then enable them and restart your computer

this shows that the drivers for the sound device are not installed .

Im getting a computer to fix tomorrow with this problem ,maybe I will find out what is the cause

Look forward to learning your findings, Caperjack.

I've read all the posts and I'm beginning to understand things a bit better.
I've solved the problem of the Windows Audio turning itself off, and I do have sound on one old program called Cubasis.
Another program, Harmony, won't function because it says "Impossible to initialise digital output ... this device is in use .. wait until it is free.." But at the time, it is the only show in town.
Nor can I get Real Player to work: there's a General Error message but it doesn't go into detail.
I've got C Media software on the system, but I actually have a SB16 sound card. So I've disabled C Media and plan to uninstall SB16 once I've found the updated SB drivers online.

I fixed it, I think.

This could maybe be useful to one or two others. I was just fiddling in XP Help, got on to Sounds and Audio Devices in Control Panel, went to - Sounds and Audio Devices Properties and looked at my default devices.
I'd been hearing only Midi OK.
Sound playback was set to:
Modem #0 Line Playback
Sound recording was set to:
Modem #0 Line Record
These were giving me no sound. I needed SB16 as my default and when I'd done it, hey presto, all these things came good. Sound is restored!
I'd be interested to receive any comments.

RussellXPD

the one im going to look at again soon has all that grayed out and i cant make any changes there ,i all ready disabled the on board sound and put a pci sound blaster 16 in and there was no change ,

One consistent thing about my system when I had the no sound problem was that in Device Manager, all of the Sound sub-entries stated This device is working properly Were all of yours working properly while it was grayed out?

Incidentally I still have a problem - that the sound is tinny, echoey, not right.
The next thing I have to do is find out how to disable on-board sound (in XP). Shouldn't be too difficult, could you give me a hint?

RussellXPD

disabling on board sound usually is done in the BIOS or mabe in device manager ,but most likely best done in the bios/setup on bootup, look for onboard devices ,where that at in the bios depends on the bios maker .usually in peripheral devices

Hi!

This is my first post to this forum! I tried what was suggested to get my sound back, however, once I got to the 'Services' window pop up, then I 'right clicked' and selected 'Properties', then made sure that under 'Startu up Type' that 'Automatic' was selected, that is where I ran into a problem. Instead of being able to click on 'Start' under
'Service Status', all the options below that were 'greyed out'. Now in the box beside the
'Service Status', it already had the word 'started', so I'm still not sure why I'm not getting any sound.

I also tried to going to my motherboard manufacturer's web site to try and download the latest sound drivers, which worked fine the first time (before my computer crashed last week), but I can't seem to repeat the same task. After I went to the Crucial web site to
get my computer's specs, I found out that my motherboard was a GMate GA-8S661FXM.
I then went to the 'Gigabyte' site, since I thought that that was the maker of my motherboard. Can somebody help? Thanks!

Sashag

What was going on in Hardware > Device Manager? - all the Sound Video and Game Controllers, were they showing as working?

RussellXPD