I have been having a really weird problem with soundblaster pci 128. Whenever I try to play audio, the playing app gives an error. So I open up the windows volume control, and it spits out an error message that says, "there are no active mixer devices available". So naturally I try reinstalling drivers. If I unistall the sbpci128 wdm drivers from the device manager, and then run the "find new hardware wizard" (which detects the uninstalled sbpci128 and reinstalls the default drivers windows provides for it) then I can play sound through my sound blaster. Problem solved? no. Because when I reboot my computer I get the same app errors and "no mixer devices available" message from the windows volume control. I then have to unistall and have redetect the windows drivers to play sound. Another weird result is that when I play audio in directsound there is a constant hiss in the background, however there is no hiss when using wavout. So I opened up dxdiag and its showing tabs for "sound 1", "sound 2", sound 3", and "music". I thought it was only supposed to show 1 tound for "sound" and 1 tab for "music". Keep in mind that I also have a modem installed which also displays as a playback and recording sound source. However in the pass dxdiag has ignored it.

I have tried a lot of things such as updating drivers, installing old drivers, windows update, reinstalling direct X 9b, but nothing is working. At the time that my poci128 started disappearing; a few things changed on my system. I ran ad-aware and got rid of a lot of spyware (however I restored the spyware, and I still get this problem.) I also installed a lot of filesharing apps (some with imbedded media players. I also messed around with some services, but I can't remember what I changed, and I didn't have system restore on (plus those services had no relation to windows audio, as far as I can tell). And finally I installed WMRecorder (which I heard on another board might be causeing the problem), so I unistalled it but I still have this problem.

The only reason I have gone into such detail, is because I have seen the symptoms of this same problem posted on many other audio and windows XP tech support boards. However no one is able to figure out a resolution to this problem. I do not want to reinstall windows. But I will remove my modem and see if that fixes this problem. Stay tuned...

I have not had this specific problem, but similar situation with other type of PCI devices have often pointed to an inability to reserve an IRQ for the device, or failures due to improper IRQ sharing (usually with a video card). If when you hav this problem, the audio device listing in the Device Manager shows an yellow/black exclamation point, this is probably what's happening.

A solution to this kind of IRQ conflict can often be found in the computer's CMOS settings, accessible when the computer first starts up during the memory check by pressing a special key (usually F2 or Delete). Make sure that you set "Plug and Play OS installed" to "No" (even though you are using a PnP compliant system, this allows the OS the most flexibility in assigning IRQ's) and then set "Force Update ESCD" to "Yes" (to have the BIOS reassign IRQ's again for devices it can recognize).

Even if this doesn't fix the problem you are having, it will not create any new problems for you.

1) Try moving the card to another PCI slot.

2) I know you stated you're lack of desire to do a reinstall of windows. But after the amount of spyware and p2p programs etc, it would probably be your best move. Barring that, you should look into a repair install which will just replace needed system files.

I removed the modem. The problem is gone. I did not move the soundcard to a new pci slot. One interesting note is that dxdiag reported both my lucent winmodem's sound playback capabilities (handset playback, speaker playback) as emulated and allocated two tabs for them("sound 1" and "sound 3"). It titled the tab for my sb soundcard as "sound 2". Now that the modem is removed it only has a "sound tab" and everything works fine. It's a good thing that I don't need my modem anymore now that I have dsl. Because I'd have to buy an expensive serial modem(which is the best way to go if you need a modem). It's still a mystery to me why my winmodem and sb card were coexisting peacefully and then, suddenly! I had a problem. I didn't make any hardware or driver changes(as far as I know). The only changes I made were the ones listed in my first post.

@Power Pigg, It might have been an irq conflict(I don't know much about irq's), but the audio listing in the device manager did not show the yellow exclamation point or any other warnings.

@dreamliner77, I've had windows xp installed for a year and a half. I'm not to eager to do fresh installs anymore. However when I was running win98 I used to do a fresh install about every 6 months. I think adaware does a good job of evicting spyware!

thanks for the suggestions!

two words- Registry Bloat.

At least think about a repair install.

Disregard my second post. I jumped the gun. The problem was not fixed =). Even after I moved my sbpci128 and network cards around and played with irq's in the bios--the problem still wasn't fixed. So I backed up my system and did a fresh install. Now 4hrs later everything works correctly. bah. At least I'm getting good at reinstalling windows though.

I had a similar problem with my work machine. In that case although it said the audio device was installed in the Device Manager it wouldn't play any sound, with the error message that no mixing device was available. Tried a number of things to fix it: windows repair, registry cleaning, demove & reinstall device, virus check, adaware scan, etc... At the same time M$ Office stopped working.
The only solution was to do a full reformat and reinstall. Since it was a work machine, the tech monkeys did the job for me perfectly.

.dd.