Doc Boy

Hey guys, I seem to have a serious problem. It all started with re-installing XP Professional on my Fujitsu Siemens OEM machine. It as an ASUS A8NE FM motherboard in it. I installed the most recent drivers for any device, and they all worked, except for the onboard AC'97 sound chip. So I uninstalled the driver, and tried some more recent versions for the AC97 chip, but none of them worked. At first, the chip was identified as a sound card by the windows audio service, but didn't deliver any sound. After a few more tries and re-installs of the driver, XP didn't even recognize the AC'97 chip as an audio device. The sounds & audio options in the control panel always showed "no audio device" and everything colored grey. Even though the AC97 chip was listed in the device managers list, and the driver declared it as running, no yellow question or exclamation marks shown. The Windows Audio service was started, and its mode was set to automatic, so no problem here. So a mate gave me an old PCI Soundcard (some Terratec with the Aureal Vortex 1 Chip on it, AU8820B2). Same problem here. I got the newest drivers, but still XP didn't recognize it as an audio device. The strangest thing is, that I can hear music now when I test the DirectMusic with dxdiag. But when I test DirectSound I get the error " HRESULT = 0x88780078 (No Driver). It'll be great if someone had some advice for me. I am really in despair! Cheers, Doc Here is the Everest Summary: Please tell me if you need some more information, I'll give you all you want to know about that system!