Sound not working after restart + settings changing

Recently I had problems with my sound card making me sound really loud and static when I talked. I fixed that but ran into another problem this morning. I noticed that my sound wasn't working. I normally watch videos on youtube and they would play, but no sound. Things like winamp would give me an error message saying it was a bad driver and for me to reinstall/install the right drivers. On games the sound would either not work or it would tell me there was a problem and the sound was disabled.

My sound card is a SoundMax one, computer is a Sony Vaio which I have had for years. I already tried using the windows help system and while I can get a temp fix for the sound problem, it comes back after restarting.

So far I've tried system restoring, rolling back my sound card driver, using the update feature and installing from SoundMax. Checking for updates will just come up with 0 saying there is no new updates. I'm considering uninstalling the card but I don't have anything or a cd to back it up with and don't want to ruin it more. I've also tried running adware and two virus scanners with nothing coming up. I went to Sony's website after and got the original driver, but didn't help the problem at all.

When my computer starts up the sound will work and will continue to work with whatever program I started using first. If I close that however or try any other programs the sound won't work anymore and my computer will just disable it. The only way to get it to work is using this method, Start > Control Panel > System > Hardware Tab > Device Manager > Sound, video and game cotrollers > Right click SoundMax Intregrated Digital Audio > Click Properties > Driver Tab > Update Driver > Select Install from a list of specific location(Advanced) > Click Don't Search. I will choose the driver to install. > Then finally click SoundMax Intregrated Digital Audio from the list and hit next. From there it will install and say it's completed and my sound will work until I restart my computer.

Another problem is that sometimes my settings will change on their own while trying to fix this. It only occurs after the sound error comes up and it doesn't always happen. My windows and task bar will get changed into a classic version, making it look like I'm using windows 95.

Also on another note which may be related. I can't host games on Warcraft 3 anymore. My router is setup to let my host and I've double checked it. Could all this be the work of some virus? I wasn't sure if I should post all this under the virus help or the system help because maybe it's something on the computers end and not some virus that can't be detected by my scanners.

I forgot to put this in. Everything on my computer worked fine the night before. This problem only came up after I woke up and got onto the computer in the morning. Windows did a update last night because I remember it saying not to turn off my computer when I was getting off for the night. Could that be related?