I am hoping someone out there can help me with this as it's extremely frustrating... Background- My sound has always worked fine in XP and have had the same sound card for 4 years and never any issues with it. About a week ago after rebooting it has not been the same and something is clearly wrong. Mp3s will play in winamp, but they seem distorted and chug along a lot more than they used to. The performance varies way too much on the what else is running at the same time. If I try opening a big program like Word or something while playing audio, my sound will go away until I reboot. System sounds still play afterwards but only partially. I have tried many things but nothing seems to fix the problem. There are 2 interesting error messages that I have gotten when trying to play sounds through media player after the sound stops, but I don't know if they really tell me anything. The first one is "the operation cannot be completed because the pins are not connected" - or something like that. And the other says something like "there is no mixer device installed". I am lost. Here is some background info and things I've tried. 1. It's a Dell p3 550 running XP with 512 ram 2. Soundcard is a Aureal/ Vortex 2 8830 3. I have uninstalled the drivers to the sound and reinstalled them with both newer ones and older ones, had no effect. 4. My NIC and video card and sound card are all using IRQ 11, but windows does not recognize any conflicts 5. I have made no major changes to my computer since this problem started, or none that I can think of. 6. My guess is that it must be a Windows problem, it is the same whether I use winamp, WMP, or anything else. 7. It has nothing to do with hardware acceleration 8. There are NO background programs that are hogging the processor 9. Sometimes the startup sound is distorted also Any help would be greatly appreciated!

hello have a look in device manager any problems showing? its sounding like corupt drivers. if no problems showing remove sound from device manager and reboot. if there are problems showing what are they ? try dealing with them. allso check your speaker wires for shorts and try pulling them out and pushing them back ina few times.