mopepom

Two days ago, my XP desktop started acting strangely. (By coincidence the time was about 2:00 a.m., EDT, December 1, 2007).

The behaviour was "intermittant loss of Taskbar and desktop icons".

I had just installed a number of new applications (including Real Player Gold and some BitTorrent stuff).

To make a long story short, the situation went from bad to worse, even after uninstalling all the suspect applications.

On boot, the machine began to hang just at the point when the XP splash screen is displayed, and the Windows chord usually sounds - just before the selection of the user name.

I tried every thing I could think of to get the system to boot - but no go - always the same result.

Since I need most of the files on my hard drive, I put another hard drive into the machine and did a clean install of XP (autostreamed with SP2 to save time).

This seems to work fine, except I can not get any sound.
Control Panel> Sounds and Audio Devices > shows "no audio devices".

However, the rest of XP seems to work OK - I can even surf the net and send this message.

TILT.


This "no sound" situation reminds me of a similar problem I had when I was doing a dual-boot exercise and clobbered my ASUS BIOS.

I suspect that I have done the same thing, by error, and that, if I can fix the "No Sound" problem, then my original hard drive will work OK again.

Before I go any deeper into this mess, I thought I had better call TSF for some help. This where I got help the last time.

Suggestions?