A friend had a problem with her Dell System, and after a Dell fix, which included downloading all MS patches, hotfixes, and service packs, she lost sound. Well, not exactly lost it; when sounds were supposed to be playing, it made a staticky machine gun sound. Speaker hardware checks out OK. I ran all the tests I could think of, and one test indicated the MS Firewall was the problem and did I want it fixed. I said yes, and the sound returned. After downloading another patch for IE 7 and something else, the sound went away again. After testing, sometimes systems sounds played and sometimes they didn't. Sometimes Powerpoint Presentations sounds played and sometimes they didn't. Sometimes the sounds could be heard under the machine gun noise. No message came up again indicating a problem with the MS Firewall. I turned off the MS Firewall altogether, and that did not solve the problem. There's obviously some software problem/conflict here but I don't know what it is. Can anyone help?

... it might be a good idea to post the exact model of the Dell I'm sure there's more than one, ... then we can download the correct sound drivers to start off Grrrr "...pentathol makes you sing like a canary" ... got brain freeze

What Dell I worked with have the sound Driver on the Resource CD I think that's what it was called.