Recently went through a reformat and a pair of knackered ram chips, and now I'm hoping that the sound card isn't f'ed as well.

Currently I'm having some very odd problems with my sound devices.
- Programs such as Team Fortress 2, foobar2000 and the DivX player play sounds without problem.
- Programs like Firefox (flash videos) and Windows Live Messenger ("you have a message" notification) are deadly silent.

DxDiag says that apparently I have 2 sound devices, however under Sounds and Audio Devices properties only the emulated one is displayed under the "Audio" tab.

The two devices are allegedly
Modem #0 Line playback (Emulated) and Sigmatel Audio (Device ID: HDAUDIO\FUNC_01VEN_8384DEV_7680SUBSYS_1)

DirectSound works fine with both of them, althought they report being unable to play from hardware buffer, and the properties dialogue for the device works it's working fine and has a mixer device.

From the control panel I came to two rather curious errors:
1. Sounds and audio devices reports No Audio Device.
2. Attempting to play a system sound turns up another error.

Oh, and I have no "Volume Control" in the task bar nor in the control panel, and trying to launch it via all programs -> accessories -> entertainment gives me this error

I'm running Windows XP Home build 2600

So wise ones, any words of help?

It all seems to indicate that there is a problem with the soundcard drivers *or* the multimedia system of XP.

If you can, get an Install CD of XP SP2, and do an installation via the "Install- Repair system" (i.e. not the console repair, but the reinstall over existing version one). This should fix the problems with the multimedia system, and maybe also install appropiate drivers for the soundcard.

You can try first to reinstall the drivers for the chipset and sigmatel, but i suspect the problem is the other one.

(I had a problem on a PC related to that. In that case i simply reformatted the PC, since reinstalling drivers didn't work and i had a ghost image of the machine).

Note: Verify your hard drive. This can (but does not have to) be a disk problem.