My OS is Windows XP Pro. (Service Pack 2). I have a Realtek sound card installed, but no sound. I tried almost everything I managed to get sound by re-installing the drivers for the sound card by doing the following procedure as suggested on various forums : * Copy C:\WINDOWS\inf\machine.inf to a temporary location * Edit your copy of machine.inf in Notepad Remove line 20 (ExcludeFromSelect=*) * Go to the Control Panel and run “Add Hardware” * When the Add Hardware Wizard appears, click Next * Wait for it to search for new hardware Choose Yes, I have already connected the hardware and click Next * Scroll all the way down and select “Add a new hardware device”, click Next Choose “Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)”, click Next * Select “Show All Devices” and click Next Click “Have Disk” * Browse to the location of your copy of machine.inf and click OK * Under Model, select “Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator”, click Next To start installing the drivers, click Next Wait for the software to install then click Finish The problem is that when I re-start my PC I get about 5 pop up windows saying : Found new hardware : Microsoft Kernel GS Wavetable Synthesizer Microsoft Kernel Wave Audio Mixer Microsoft Kernel Acoustic Echo Canceller Microsoft Kernel DLS Shynthesizer Microsoft Kernel SRM Audio Descrambler When I go to device manager under sound. video & game controllers I see all of the above but with a yellow (!) In addition to that everything freezes up except for the device manager, so to at least be able to use my PC I have to uninstall again the drivers for the sound card and all the above. I don't have a clue of what's wrong at this stage, it's driving me mad, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Your Realtek sound card is probably an integrated sound chip. I don't know what forum advised you to go though any editing. That should not be necessary. Are you sure you are using the correct drivers for you Realtek sound? Post the model of your MBoard or computer? Has the sound worked properly in the past? Did your computer come with Vista pre-installed?

The motherboard is an Asus P5KPL-VM and the sound card was integrated with it, the drivers I'am using are from the ASUS original CD which came with the Motherboard and which also included the drivers for the Realtek. In the past the sound was ok, I just started my PC yesterday and there was no sound.

You could check the Asus site to see if there are any updated drivers. Maybe a Windows update messed with the current ones or something. Tech Alpha Computer Forums

Look at recent Microsoft updates in Contorl panel> add remove programs. Tick the box to show updates. If there were recent updates that co-incide with this issue Google for the KN number to see what the update was for. If you find any for hardware then remove them using the add/remove programs function. Another choice is to perform a system restore to a date prior to this problem. You may have it recur if it was an update from MSoft.

I went through the same issues several months ago with the Reaktek integrated sound chip on a new motherboard I had just installed and I also have XP Home SP2. Nothing I found worked except buying a pci audio card from Creative and Presto! Problem solved, of course I had to disable the integrated sound in bios but it works great.

Try putting the asus motherboard cd into the drive and let it load. Install the chipset drivers and the audio driver. Reboot after install. You didn't happen to install another piece of hardware into a slot on the motherboard?? Others who disagree with us may not be wrong, bad or evil