[Vista Horrors]

I left my computer last night and to find today this morning there was a problem with the sound. I was playing music last night fine as I generally do each day. No changes were made and no installations to make the audio not work.

When playing some music I can see the playback devices shows the graphic equaliser so it is receiving some output but no sound can be heard. I just left my computer up all day and night like I always do (can't put it into energy saving mode because I need an active Internet connection for work related software) it is n 24/7 365 and I rarely reboot it unless I installed something like windows updates. Also I have SP2.

I noticed that last night my speaker icon in system tray was flashing on/off from being muted icon to normal non muted icon. This is something that has never happened before. I tried to see why this was showing at the time but as the music was still playing I didn't think it was a problem so just thought maye some other software was interferring with windows or something. Also worth mentioning is that my audio devices are listed many times which I hever never had before and I noticed this about a week ago but the audio was fine then. I do not recognise DSaudiodevice_310 as my normal default device but it has been since 17th of September. Also as you can see in the screenshot Tucbaudio is listed down many times. Any idea why the name of my default audio device has been renamed and why there are so many Tuc-b ones listed? When anything like this happened to me I am usually able to troubleshoot it by myself and solve it relatively fast but this time I have no idea what may have caused it. I hope you can guide me through possible causes. Thank you.

Recent software installations are as follows:
COMODO Internet security
Prevx
SpywareGuard (javacoolsoftware)
SpywareBlaster (javacoolsoftware)
TagTuner

If it can'tbe fixed I will have to make a clean install of vista which I really don't want to do. I was waiting to buy W7 before making a clean install onto a new HDD.

[p_trice]

I'm not really sure about that because I have never had that problem. But it is possible that those new programe changed something that it shouldn't have or your audio device on your motherboard is messed up. If all else fails i would just back up some important files and try to reinstall windows and see if that fixes it

[Vista Horrors]

Thanks for the advice. I managed to solve the audio problem and can now hear sound but my mic does not work. I am working on this but I think at some point some software has altered the audio devices. Fortunately mic use is not as high a priority as audio for the time being. I will try uninstalling some software or reverting back any changes if possible.

[Waldi]

Have you checked to see which programs are assigned to your audio defaults?

[Vista Horrors]

Yes, I checked to see which default audio device is used by software. iTunes and Winamp work fine now as does sound but because I do not generally look at my audio devices I forgot which one was normally set to default. The good news is I now know which software may have caused this. I just found it strange that the default audio device was changed in windows settings even though I had not recently installed any new software. It is not a security threat or virus of any kind. Still working on making the mic work though.

[Vista Horrors]

Aside from the recent audio problems which was not caused by vista but third part software as far as I can see with 99% certainty which software caused it. I am experiencing a very annoying problem with windows explorer. I waited many years for Microsoft to listen to tens of millions of end users call for the removal of the IE integration into the Windows explorer kernel which helped to greatly stop crashes of the shell/explorer. But since I installed SP2 I no longer see two processes of explorer.exe - one the shell and one for explorer itself. Hmm, maybe I am confused slightly and hope if I am you could shed some insight on this for me. It really annoys me to see SP2 causing my system to crash every 5 mins like Windows 98, Windows XP did for me that was responsible for destroying 6 brand new computers that technicians were unable to repair. I have had nothing but great experience with Vista until very recently. 3 weeks after installing SP2 and (windows is up to its old traits again) explorer continually crashes now and a web search brings up thousands of similar forum threads on the matter. Seems I will be uninstalling SP2 now.

Internet Explorer is no longer integrated with Windows Explorer....but since SP2 has been installed task manager shows only one process of explorer running when there used to be two instances of two different processes and now it constantly crashes and some programs just won't run at all because of this. If a Linux distro OS was released to be compatible with windows software without emulation and had driver support Microsoft would be out of business. Important: It is Windows Explorer that crashes for me not IE - Ido not use IE at all. Enough of my rant about this, it is very frustrating though. Mods, feel free to close this thread.

[Vista Horrors]

As suspected Vista was not performing as well as normal and the explorer.exe process was crashing due to the SP2 installation. An uninstall has made the system stable once more.