How to diagnose sound problems?

1. drivers (such as for a sound card) are installed from the device manager in Windows
2. BIOS updates are done off a boot disk, at a DOS prompt
3. there are 3 files in the zip for updating your BIOS that I linked to. I suspect the vxd is from wherever you downloaded a sound driver.

Monger,
This morning I went to this link you gave: http://www2.driverguide.com/uploads/uploads13/14318.html, and got the file at that location. It contained four subfiles, including a driver, which I unzipped. Then I went to device manager and browsed to that specific file and said to update the driver with it. While copying it, it ran into 3 subfiles, for which it indicated that my current version was more recent and that the system recommended using that. I went along with it and said yes, OK. Nothing. Then, hoping that one of those files contained the corruption, I went back to device manager, and redid it, telling it "no" to those three files. However, setup could not find the file cmuninst.exe on the specified path. I skipped it. System rebooted, and I now have my windows sound back. What is the missing file?

Now that the sound issue is hopefully resolved, let's go back to updating the BIOS, if you still feel that is desirable. The very first window when booting up shows a release date of 1/10/2000S. However, further along, while it is looking for boot information from IDE-0, the BIOS date indicates 1995. What do you think? The so-called most current version of BIOS for my version is unzipped, sitting in c:unzipped. I also have it in a second place, from the download this morning from the above-referenced site.

Also back is the C-MEDIA Mixer, which I had yanked off the system yesterday.

That's great to hear your sound is working. Ise been posting for a while now that a driver installation should be tried first ..glad to hear it worked out that way as that's the easiest course.

Whatever this C-Media program you mention is, I presume it's getting installed as a bundle with the sound card's driver.

I recommend you leave your BIOS alone, unless there is some specific functionality/fix you're aware of that you need for it.

And Ise still curious what 4th file you're downloading.

Actually, there is more to it than a fourth file. I downloaded it twice. First from pcchips' global site (as I couldn't get into pcwave.com which serves North America), and then again this morning, through your link at driversguide.

I'm trying to remember which is which. But one of them had 5 files: the square white box with a blue stripe across the top that kind of looks like a calendar, called ami, another ami MSDOS file, instructions file, a M598lmr.rom file, and a Vjoyd.vxd file.

The other download had 4 files: nt40,W2K-MC, win 95-98, and WinXP.

And this is curious....if my past, presumably corrupted driver had three files on it which were newer than the files I was "updating" the driver with, then there has to be a newer version of the driver out there then the one I just installed.

I'm not going to mess with it right now. I have sound, which is the main thing. I can access my messages on the internet answering machine from Callwave.

The file which could not be found, cmuninst.exe, is presumably an uninstall file, which I don't really need anyway.

While I have your ear, how do I change allocation sizes? Whenever I have frozen or have to shutdown because Windows doesn't completely close, half the time, when I turn it back on and it goes through its self-check routine, I get the following error message: allocation error, too little or too much space has been allocated to: \WINDOWS\APPLIC~1\IDENTI~1\{1A531~1\MIC>>.

I let it fix it, and then I don't see that error message for a while when the self-check runs, but eventually it will come back. This has been happening in the past as well, not just at this moment with my sound issue.