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Sound doesn't work, SndVd&GmCtrl device CALLED "Disabled Device" in Device Manager!? Help me fix boss' computer QUICKLY!

CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
I really need help! I am in a SERIOUS jam. If you want to read why, I had to post that in Off Topic because it's just another long story.

Anyway, one of my bosses has a "Payroll Computer" full of proprietary corporate applications and proprietary VPN software and settings which was imaged onto the drive by corporate with no installations CDs or documentation available. It CAN NOT be formatted. I think it's a hardware problem just the same. I MUST get this fixed. 🙁

He's the kind of user that loads every PC he touches full of spyware and crap then locks it down with a password on everything. Hotbar, Limewire + AdWare, Comet Cursor, some mish-mashed Star Trek + Star Wars theme, you name it. He spends all day playing Midtown Madness 1 & 2 and Motocross Madness on it. Not surprisingly, his sound stopped working.

Important details:
Dell Optiplex GX1
Windows 98 1st Edition
Pentium III 500
Integrated Crystal 4236b / 4237b chipset soundcard
Intrusion Detection is not an issue because I have the boot/CMOS password

Anyway, when a sound plays such as a standard WAV of MP3 file, you get the same error you'd get if you didn't have a soundcard. The speaker icon is not available. Multimedia control panel says there is no sound hardware. Even when everything appears to be installed correctly.

A peek in the Device Manager under "Sound, Video and Game Controllers" shows the Crystal chipset related devices as all installed and working with no conflicts, including one "device" CALLED "Disabled Device"

Removal and reinstallation with the latest drivers yielded the same strange list of devices. Removal of the devices and every related inf file and related driver file on the drive before reinstalling from the latest freshly downloaded driver also yielded nothing.

I went into the CMOS / BIOS Setup and found the "Enable / Disable" option under "Integrated Devices" and disabled it. I restarted to remove everything yet again before re-enabling it revealed that the devices were still in the device manager. Upon removal, they will be redetected with a click of the refresh button. I checked the setting again, and it does say disabled (?!). Could the Enable / Disable function simply be screwed up? How could that happen?
 
Is there any new bios? Have you tried older drivers? Ummm... how about getting the same audio card and trying it in place of that one? Maybe something is wrong with that.

Also, try putting it in a different PCI slot in the computer. One more thing, that the card out, reboot, and see what happens. See if Disabled Device is still there. Remove it if it is and reboot. If its not there, put it back in and reboot. Beyond that, how about calling Dell support?
 
I figured out that you have to do a hard reboot to get the integrated sound devices to disable.

I also Googled and found that the resource-stealing "Disabled Device as a device" thing is normal for corporate implementations of the sound chipset where the gameport was not used. They just renamed the device and left the port out. I tried installing DirectX9 and got various one-time errors and crashes upon restarting. Launching DXDIAG will repeatedly throw it into a fit of errors, but it does say "DirectX9.0b" so it did get partially installed.

I tried disabling all the other integrated devices in case something was conflicting, but now that the "Disabled Device" thing is figured out I doubted that that was it and it wasn't.

DirectX could have been screwed up to begin with causing the upgrade to fail. Right?

Anyone remember the Win98 DirectX removal instructions? I'll hit Google...

Now I suspect a software problem of course but I'm already posted right?

Soundcard chipset information added above... (Crystal 4236b / 4237b)

The drivers came from Dell. The problem started with older drivers so I doubt that's it. 🙁

The card and all devices are either virtual (VPN adapters and such) or integrated and I tried disabling all integreated devices.

Oh, and my brother already updated the BIOS to the latest version when he tried to fix it.
 
Did you update the Motherboard drivers! they are different than Bios. this might help especialy if the sound is integrated.
 
So much junk is messed up on this PC... It's a 440BX chipset so drivers have been pretty much stable on that for a loooooong time. 🙂

I did update with everything on Dell's site and everything that would install with Windows Update, which does provide Intel INF updates (Intel's form of chipset drivers) for Intel-chipset boards that need them.
 
Multimedia Control Panel and Speaker information added above (Windows reports no sound hardware under Multimedia control panel and has no speaker icon)
 
Used DirectX Eradicator to remove all DirectX junk (That's the latest DirectX Uninstaller I could find) and started over from Windows Update.

Got a "dxdllreg" error when I restarted. I think this is one of the errors that showed up before. It's the only error that popped up this time but I did have all integrated devices except the NIC disabled.

Everything still crashes like normal in DXDIAG
 
Removed again and installed DirectX8 and everything went smooth. Launched DXDIAG and got only one error this time "This program has performed an illegal operation" with "DXDIAG" in the title bar but the DXDIAG window loaded anyway (This is exactly what it was doing before minus a million other errors).

I've removed all the spyware, disabled all start-up entries and removed lines from the config.sys and autoexec.bat but something is still screwing with DirectX... (Not me 😉)

Edit: Well, after restarting everything returned to the old crashing schedule. "Could not get extended display information" and such. I'll try ATI's video driver but I'm almost out of ideas.
 
I set the ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP 2x's driver to "Standard" then rolled back to DX6.1 and dxdiag started giving me the same error except now it refers to "extended sound information"

Hmm. Anyone know haw to reinstall just the sound support in Windows? 😀
 
Thnx. I wasn't able to fix it before leaving though. I have a backup plan now that I hope I can execute. I just need to slip in with a copy of Ghost and a second HDD, image it then upgrade it to Win98 SE and hope it goes smoothly. I can't think of any other way to keep all the applications installedn while basically reinstalling whatever part of Windows is responsible for this...

I guess there's no real way to "fix" Windows.
 
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