Hi - Sound is working fine when I play music in the OS, but there's no sound in programs, like games, etc. I have reinstalled the drivers for both soundcard and directx 9b (twice), I was missing a ntkern.vxd file, but replaced it. When I run the dxdiag diagnostic for sound 1, 2, 3 I get this message: "DirectSound test results: failure at step 10 (Secondary buffer): HRESULT = 0x8878001e (Control not available)" and the message "DirectSound test results: failure at step 6 (Activating the IDirectMusicPort): HRESULT = 0x88781131(error code)" when trying Microsoft Synthesizer under Music. I've got SoundMAX Digital Audio. Any help would be appreciated - thanks!

Have you gone into "Device Manager" to see if there's a problem? Click on Start/Control Panel/Double click System icon and choose "Device Manager" tab. Navigate to your sound card Devices and Right click and Remove(uninstall) all of them. Then reboot the computer and let windows auto detect your sound card and let windows reload the drivers. Does this fix the problem?

Yes, that was the first thing I did. Device Manager reports no problems with the sound card, either before or after I reinstalled it. Any other suggestions?

I am having pre-CISE-ly the same problems on a newly installed Win98 machine with the CMedia on-board AC97 sound chip. I have reinstalled or updated everything in sight. I get both symptoms: DirectSound failes at step 10 with code 0x8878001e unless all acceleration is disabled, and DirectMusic fails at step 6 (with code 0x88781131) with the Microsoft synthesizer. (It works in the GS Wavetable or Midi Mapper mode.) I have tried with DirectX 8.1 and 9.0b. I have downloaded drivers form the Mobo maker (pcchips) and from CMedia. All I can be glad about is that I haven't made anything worse. Game sound is rather poor with all acceleration disabled.

SO, anyone else running into this? Or, more desirably, a solution to this? I'm still getting no where fast...