Posts by laloek

So is the only way to correct this problem is with a recovery partition? Is that the same thing as reformatting and wiping out the hard drive and reinstalling windows? If not, how do I do it? I really hope this is a last resort, if anyone else has experienced this and actually fixed it, I would be ever grateful.

update: so i tried some more things, suggested by people here. Updated my audio driver, my sound blaster software, but I think things actually became worse after I did so. Now all my audio (not just my media files) stopped working. I also started to get error messages from windows: "Host Process for Windows Services stopped working and was closed" and also, "the windows audio service has stopped running". Later tonight i'm going to try to repair my system with the vista disk. But honestly i'm not too hopeful, I have a feeling i'm going to end up having to reformat the whole system.

The exact same thing started on my computer two days ago, it's getting pretty frustrating. All my media files stopped working after I installed a new version of AIM. I tried to uninstall AIM, reinstall winamp, tried system restore, tried updating windows, scanned for viruses, etc...and nothing has worked so far. Has anyone found a solution to this problem? Sounds for the OS work fine, and audio from websites like youtube work fine so I don't think it's a driver problem. Please help! Thanks in advance.