problem installing santa cruz drivers

I had a few issues with my mouse and joystick and for some odd reason my sound card just quit on me. When I went to reinstall my drivers it wanted me to reboot but when I rebooted it asked me to reboot again. I just clicked don't reboot and it installed the drivers fine and everything looks OK but still no sound. When I open the Santa Cruz control panel I get the diagnostic program which fails.

The biggest clue I have is that everything looks fine in the device manager but the Sound and Audio Devices control panel does not detect my sound card. All the settings are greyed out.

I have two sets of drivers, version 4193 and 4161. I've been using 4161 because 4193 has never worked for me. When I try to install 4193 drivers, I get this error:

0x80040706
Object reference not found

I tried reinstalling my installsheild application with this tutorial:

http://consumer.installshield.com/kb.asp?id=Q110641

But that was a dead end. I've tried all sorts of registry cleaners and deleting the reg keys and files manually(this method usually works) but to no avail. I've also tried a different PCI slot. I know it is not a hardware issue because I have another install on this computer and it works fine on that one. I'm completely lost and I don't want to reformat because of this, any help apprectiated.

 

anyone?

 

OK, how do I load drv files? I know you can use regsvr32.exe to load dlls. I'm thinking because certain dlls and other files aren't being loaded is the problem. I just compared the dlls my sound and audio control panel loads with a friends, and hers loads alot more than mine. It's just the only obvious ones are drv files. Am I getting warm here or is this another dead end?