[Ansel]

For about a week now, my sound has been completely dead. One afternoon, I tried to listen to a song and it wouldn't play. I tried to adjust my volume, and it was at full and unmuted-- but still no sound. I checked with a pair of headphones to see if my speakers were the issue, but once again there was nothing. Since then, I've tried everything I could think of to remedy the problem, and here is a short list of everything I've attempted.

Checked to see if my speakers were the issue. Unless my headphones broke at the same time, that's not it.
System Restore to the previous afternoon. It was a hunch that I didn't expect to be accurate--it wasn't.
Uninstalling/Reinstalling audio drivers. I downloaded the latest Sigma-Tel driver from the Dell website, but it had no effect.
I waded through the Control Panel and checked everything I could think of. My speakers are selected as the primary audio device in Sound, and the correct driver is selected in Device Manager.

One thing I should definitely mention is that some programs are having trouble with sound. For example, if I try to play a sound file or a video with sound in WMP, it simply can't open it, or play it at all. My NES emulator can't boot up ROMs anymore, and I'm assuming this is related to the dynamic sound generation the NES used--some kind of audio jigger is faling to load. There's another one I can't remember, but most interestingly when I try to test my sound setup in the Sound panel I'm greeted with this unsettling message: Failed to play test tone.

I'm getting the feeling something is fundamentally amiss here.

Any suggestions? I think reinstalling my OS would fix the problem, but I've jsut barely finished recovering from a protracted difficulty with Adobe Flash and have recently spent a lot of time reskinning many of my programs. Any suggestions on what could be causing this or how I could fix it?

[Mollie]

Right before your sound wouldn't play, had you done anything specific with your computer, i.e., install/uninstall software or hardware, change configuration settings, services, etc.?

What sound card do you have? What version of Vista? What anti-virus, anti-spyware do you use?

What are your complete computer specs?

The more information you give us, the easier it is for us to help you.

Mollie

[Ansel]

I'd been uninstalling and reinstalling programs to open/edit my system files all week, as I've been editing my Windows Visual Style and extracting and recompiling images. However, none of those should have any relation to my sound files. In my System32 folder, I edited Shell32.dll and browsui.dll, both of which govern the appearance of windows and the explorer interface, and are unrelated to sound. A system restore to the previous afternoon should've undone any changes, unless I'm mistaken.

My computer (a laptop) is a Dell Inspiron 1526 running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. AMD 2 Ghz processor, 3 GB RAM. I could retrieve a longer list, but I'm unsure what is and is not relevant. Is there anything in particular that's important?

[Dudeofthed]

This could also be a Codec issue. Make sure you have the correct sound codecs.

Usually, you can download the correct codec from your Sound Cards manufacturers website