Cant keep customers soundcard loaded in WinMe? Any ideas?

[John Prophet]

Heres the deal. Working on a WinMe system..Biostar M6TLA mobo...P2-233..128M (3 dimms).

Machine has sevral errors. Cant open Corel wordperfect etc.

The main problem at this point is that I cant load a soundcard. Actually I can load a card, it will install and it will work, but as soon as I reboot, the vol control will be missing from the taskbar, and there will be no sound. The card will still show up in the device manager as working.
Another tech worked on it then it came back and I inherited it. He told me that he tried PCI soundcard in all the PCI slots but no go, so I was trying ISA cards. The ISA cards would install, work, then dissappear on reboot. When I went into control panel>Multimedia...even if the soundcard was working it wouldnt show up in the multimedia applet, the whole "audio" tab would be greyed out.

When I installed a pci souncard it installed perfectly, worked AND showed up in the multimedia applet but then it too dissappeared on reboot. Any ideas? or is it time for a WinMe reinstall?

Thanks JP

[Ace McGirk]

are these somewhat older cards? (2-3yrs)

I have a modem that does this until I go into device manager and manually set an IRQ for it,like your problem,it would work fine until a reboot(it is pnp btw)but once I set an IRQ for it ,it works fine

[Inanis]

This may sound stupid but .. .

Go into safe mode. Remove all references to sound cards. Under the "Sound Video and Game Controllers" you will also see something to the effect of "microsoft streaming clock proxy" and "microsoft kernel . . something" remove those.

Now, at this point, boot the machine to DOS and do a fresh install of windows overtop of the current installation.

That may fix your problem. I have seen similar problems like this when you use a WDM based driver for the sound card instead of a .VXD based driver, and I had to do the above procedure to get sound to work.

It may be a long shot .. . but it may work.

[John Prophet]

I ran Dr watson and it told me the problem straight up.

"The file mmsystem.dll is not listed in the [boot] section of system.ini. Multimedia services may be erratic"

So I looked at a w98 machine and found the mmsystem.dll reference in the system.ini file and just typed the same thing into the system.ini. Worked.

driver=mmsystem.dll