sound issue

Here is the problem.

When I opened VLC media player to watch a video file then when I first opened it I didn't have sound. So I closed it and reopened it and I got sound. It did that every time, but it was easy to bypass and it didn't seem to affect anything else.

Now I wanted to play Return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory. I downloaded it and installed it and when I opened the game I had no sound. (I had sound with all other games: America's Army, GTA IV, Mediaval II, Medieval II Kingdoms, Fallout 3 etc.)

So I downloaded the installer for realtek drivers from HP. I went to control panel/programs and uninstalled the realtek sound drivers. It said that there was an error uninstalling them.

I restarted my computer and checked the programs list to uninstall it again, but it wasn't there (the realtek drivers). I also didn't have sound. So I started the installer I downloaded from HP and installed the realtek drivers.

I restarted my computer. But the only sound there was was windows startup/closing and the speaker test sounds. Everything else didn't produce a sound. Also the windows startup and closing sounds came from the internal speakers even though I had my headphones plugged in.

So I restarted and checked the sound again, same thing and I did a system restore to the sound driver uninstalling point. The computer restarted, wndows startup sound came from the plugged in headphones. It said that the system restore was sucessful, but the sound is the same! Only startup/closing and speaker test sounds in HD Audio manager and ControlPanel/Sound work!

How is this be possible? Isn't a system restore supposed to restore your system? :cry

Windows Vista 32 bit home premium sp1

 

Now i did a restore to 3 days ago and nothing. What good is a system restore if it doesn't restore anything?

 

System restore is like repair install for Windows, you run it and hope. It's an easy fix if it works, but if it doesn't you move on.

You should check your device manager. Right click on "my computer" and click properties. Click on "device manager" off to your left. If there are any drivers marked with "!" or "?" you should tell us, or even better, attack a pic of your device manager window with the audio category open. If there is a "!" or "?" on a driver, you should open up the driver to see what Windows says the problem is.

 

no ! or ? on anything.

i think i'll have to format

 

Locate the audio device in Device Manager and either update or rollback the driver.

 

tried updating but i have the latest version and there is nothing to roll back to

 

You could try uninstalling the audio device and then rebooting. Let system automatically find the audio device and then have it automatically install the driver.

You hearing the startup/closing/test sounds, I'm leading to believe that this is not actually a driver problem but more of an audio codec issue.

Strange that one game doesn't have sound but other games are ok.

Tried uninstalling and reinstalling VLC and playing video file?

 

Tried to uninstall it again but every time windows game me a setup.exe has stopped working error. I just did a format and now everything works.