My sound card (SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio) is installed and is recognised by the PC but no sound is coming out due to an unknown problem. When I load Quicktime it says 'Quicktimeplayer has caused an error in KERNEL32.DLL. Quicktimeplayer will now close'.
When I load Realplayer it says 'Cannot open audio device. Another application may be using it'. When I try to use Sound recorder it says 'Sound recorder cannot record or play back because a sound device is not installed'. I know for a fact that my sound card is installed. Please could somebody tell me why it is not being used.

You may want to look in device manager and see if there are any conflicts, also try testing your soundcard by running dxdiag...

I've tried both but still no go.

if the sound card is being detected by the system in the Device Manager and you are still not recieving sound and you continue to get the error mesages mentioned above, then I would suggest you perform the following steps:

Remove the sound card from the Device Manger and restart the system.

The system will automatically detect the card and then you will have to reinstall the drivers for the sound card once again.

Thanks for the tip moteur7.Unfortunately it didn't work for me. It seems to have an "unknown problem" which is stopping it from being used by the programs.