Hi, Last night I was installing the drivers and software for my webcam (3Com webcam lite) when the installer crashed. After restarting my sound card stopped working. It has a (!) symbol next to it and states that: "The NTKERN.VXD, MMDEVLDR.VXD device loader(s) could not load the driver. (Code 2)". The sound card is a C-Media 9738 on-board sound card which came with my motherboard. It uses AC97. I already tried re-installing the sound drivers, etc, but with no luck. I then installed the webcam software again, after doing so the (!) disappears, but no sound is played and the Audio tab under Multimedia Properties of the control panel is completely grayed out. If I uninstall the webcam the old error message appears. Here are some of the solutions I've tried. -> Disabling USB through BIOS, uninstalling usb drivers, re-installing sound card drivers (in various combinations). -> Disabling the sound card through BIOS, completely uninstalling, then re-installing. -> Using System File Checker to extract NTKern.vxd and MMDEVLDR.VXD -> Going into safe-mode and removing all sound devices, then re-installing. -> Banging my head against the wall ;) Does anyone have any idea of what causes this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Peter

you card uses the built-in sound chipset, so if you disable it, the mobo will never detect it. try this, 1) make sure the setting in the bios for the sound is "enabled" 2) go into windows, delete the device for your sound card. 3) download the newest driver for your sound card, then install it by "add new hardware", remember to select the new driver you downloaded in the hardware options. 4) reboot. tim

I've already tried that. I don't think I explained that too well, I disabled the sound card, deleted all the drivers and removed the device, then enabled it again and re-installed.