i've been having the "there is no active mixer devices available" problem on my xp pc at home and at work. the work computer was fixed easy enough after running services.msc and starting up the windows audio function and hasn't really been an issue since.
the home computer is a different story
having dealt with the problem at the office i was quick to do the same at home, i ran services.msc, but low and behold windows audio was already started. so i restarted it anyway, in doing so it popped up that it would also restart creative audio. once all this was done i went to check by starting up the mixer program, and low and behold "there is no active mixer devices available" still pops up.
this is were things get worse
i did some more reading into the cause and found that it may be some kind of driver conflict, and was told that i could run msinfo32 to run a scan for conflicts. went to msinfo32 and it couldn't scan, then i read that you have to either run it from diagnostic mode or activate it from diagnostic mode. after rebooting in diagnostic mode the first thing i notice is that windows isn't recognizing that my copy of xp is not activated, which is was not but 5 minutes ago
long story short now my sound doesn't work properly and windwos is going to stop working in 3 days, and i have no idea what to do