Please Help! Wave on volume keeps muting itself; invisible pop ups

Hi,
ive been looking for a solution for a months and have finally stumbled on this website. Hope anyone will be able to help me because I am really confused. OK, so what seems to be wrong is the wave on my volume control turns off at random, sometimes even the whole volume control will cease to work until I go to services and reset it, also i have been getting multiple iexplore.exe processes opening up in my task manager which seems weird because I don't have internet explorer open (I use Google chrome). I am not extremely tech-savy so explanation would be much appreciated. I beg of you please help me, I've been struggling with this for a while and surfing the net for help with no solution yet. I appreciate you taking the time and reading this!

sincerely,
Aaron

P.s. Im on windows xp on a hp mini 110