acer PCMCIA failure

my pcmcia has suddenly stopped functioning on my acer aspire 5672wlmi.
there appears to be no power going to the device (indigo echo i/o soundcard) The device works fine in my antique dell laptop, so i know the problem is not within the card itself.
i have tried reloading all of the drivers and checked (for the first time mind you) the BIOS for functionality of the slot. I could not find any acknowledgement within of anything related.
the BIOS in general seems just that...extremely general.
(Acer v1.3221) and does not indicate anything detailed about my system!

how can i find out if the cardbus slot is functional or disabled, etc?

any suggestions would be appreciated.

the only error in winxp pro-sp2 device manager is that the non plug and play driver "serial.sys" is flagged. (not sure if it's related)