A7N8X Deluxe - SoundStorm hardware not being detected by XP?

[BKnight]

My wife's computer is running an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (rev. 1.06) motherboard with an Athlon 3200+ CPU. Recently, the sound just stopped working and she asked me to take a look at it. Thinking it would be something simple, I delved into finding the problem and ended up spending hours trying to fix it, going so far as formatting and reloading Windows XP from scratch. Windows XP simply does not recognize the SoundStorm hardware as far as I can tell. Device manager does not show any unknown devices, and Sounds and Audio Devices in the Control Panel does not have any devices listed. I only attempted to load the drivers that came on the CD shipped with the motherboard (1.16) with the new load of the OS so far. However, I tried different versions after cleaning the drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5 with her original XP load with no success. I even went as far as to try flashing the BIOS with different (older BIOS) and have settled with 1008. I *know* for sure that the cables are correct (speakers connected to the green hole) and I have enabled Post Speech Reporter which works when I boot the system to tell me nothing is wrong and Windows is now booting. However, once in Windows, it does not even see the hardware like it does not exist or is disabled. My one suspicion is that the motherboard is disabling the SoundStorm for some reason but I can't force it to be enabled because the BIOS only has the options of Auto and Disabled. Does anyone have any suggestions for me before I call and RMA the board?