Eddie Izzard once said he suffered not from technophobia, but the opposite - technobravado. I suspect I may be the same. I recently ran Windows update and since then I haven't been able to get any sound on my PC. This is not just WMP but all sound files. In WMP I'm getting the error message: 0xC00D11BA: Cannot play the file, and this states that "there is a problem with your sound device, such as a sound card or sound controller." I checked in My Computer and Via AC'97 Audio Controller (WDM) was listed with no exclamation mark next to it. Checking under Properties, there were no hardware conflicts and it wasn't disabled. However, under "Sounds and Multimedia" everything was greyed. Also, there was no speaker icon on my desktop toolbar. I ran dxdiag.exe and this stated "No sound card was found. If one is expected, you should install a sound driver provided by the hardware manufacturer." Following other forum suggestions I reinstalled DirectX (and uninstalled Winamp, which was crashing). I installed the DriverGuide Toolkit, backed up my drivers and checked for driver updates, and it said that my driver was the most recent version. However I reinstalled it anyway, which made no difference, and then tried deinstalling the driver. Now it won't reinstall! Not from the original CD, not from the downloaded update, not from the backed-up driver, not from Windows Update, nothing. And whenever I open Device Manager it tells me "sucatreg has caused an error in kernel.dll", and when I try to Add New Hardward it says that "cmdninst has caused an error" in various pages. Any ideas? Merry Christmas, by the way! Ellie

My PC came with AC97 intergrated sound, and I never had sound I could depend on ,sometimes sound other times no sound ,I went back and forth with the computer tech's from the company I purchased the PC from. At the urging of a neighbor of mine who is a computer programmer ,we installed a PCI sound card and I now have better sound that works all the time. We never could figure out what it was a hardware related prob or the driver. If you where not having any probs with the sound B/4 this one popped up ,it could not hurt to try a system restore to a time B/4 the problem started, system restore has corrected , error problems for me B/4 . I was getting a error notice related to Internet Explorer, everyone was telling me to only way to get rid of that error message was to format and reinstall my O/S . I was dreding the thought of doing that ,so I tried a system restore ,guess what ,I never seen the error message again ! Good Luck Nick

Thanks Nick, that does sound like a great solution... unfortunately I found that System Restore has been disabled. So there are no restore points. Aargh! Apart from the annoying error messages and lack of sound, everything else is working. Is this problem likely to mean I have to reinstall Windows ME? and if so, can I just upgrade to XP instead, as ME has been driving me nuts for a few years.

goto the via site instead of motherboard site to get latest sound & board drivers. you can upgrade to xp david

Good call! I now have a working driver (Vinyl AC'97 Codec combo) which is recognised by my device manager. However, I still don't have any sound, everything in Sounds & Multimedia is still greyed out, dxdiag.exe still thinks I've got no sound card (and dxdiag is now crashing too) and I'm still getting the sucatreg error messages. Would an upgrade fix this or should I try to get it fixed before upgrading?

read this link as i think your directx is messed up, try dx9.0b not c version. post result. http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?s=7afd72a39846ffaccad0aba30fac14ba&threadid=10261 david

Thanks David, I'll try that. Would you believe though I'm just about to go to Australia for 4 weeks - so will try it and post result when I get back! Cheers Ellie