Hi All

Firstly - apologies in advance for this new topic - there are already several very similar on this board (and many others all over the web)  I have spent the past 2 days following all sorts of advice, but nothing seems to have worked. I have done my best to RTFM I promise, but I'm now - officially - at my wit's end.

I installed what I thought was a nifty little gadget, NCH Soundtap, which WOULD allow me to RECORD audio streams.  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Instead it hijacked my soundcard and stopped any other software from being able to use it. My laptop now believes I have no sound device. Needless to say, I have since uninstalled the software and I just want my sound back!

I now get all the symptoms described by many other people on this board - no audio, yellow exclamation mark icons beside all of the sound devices in control panel, a code 39 error whenever I try to uninstall and reinstall the drivers etc etc.

(Notably, whenever I try to install the drivers it always has trouble locating the dlls, ksuser and ks.sys, although I am able to locate them on my system and point the installer in the right direction)

I have tried installing the kb888111 patch as recommended.

I have run Everest, which lists under multimedia: Intel 82801GBM ICH7-M - High Definition Audio Controller.  (is this the same as Realtek?)
The motherboard chipset is listed as:  Intel Calistoga i945GM/PM

My Laptop is an old-ish Acer Aspire 5680, running Windows XP  (the original installation disks are long lost)

It occurs to me that I might be following the whole process correctly, but that I may have located the wrong drivers to reinstall

Please, PLEASE, can any you clever people out there hazard a guess as to where I might be going wrong?

Thanks

The code 39 error is explained here....http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310123 with directions Thank you for this - it does give a more detailed description of code 39 than i have found elsewhere - but I have followed the procedure is recommends many times and the result is always the same. 

I uninstall the drivers, restart, then reinstall - but the last dialog box of the installation tells me there is a problema nd my hardware might not load correctly - because of a code 39 problem.

There are so many drivers available on the Realtek website - how can I be sure I have absolutely the right drivers for my card and motherboard?I'm not sure this will help but you can give it a try.....

Go to Control panel>Administrative tools>Services>Windows Audio>See if it's enabled or restart.....

With regards to the drivers, I've used RadarSync with SUCCESS to download Realtek drivers.okay - the windows audio service was running, but I restarted it again anyway.

I installed RadarSync - what a cool utility - and used it to download the correct drivers.  I then uninstalled the existing drivers, disconnedted the device and reinstalled these new ones.

SAME RESULT     (restart my machine, follow new hardware wizard, end up with 'cannot start this hardware - cannot load the device driver. the driver may be corrupt or missing (code 39)'

At LEAST, TRYING to take the positives from the situation, I now know I have the correct drivers - it must be something else - although what, lord knows.

Incidentally, I also uninstalled the other items I saw in the hardware list that had yellow exclamation marks beside them (Bluetooth audio, Acer Orbicam etc)  and all of these suffer the same problem  (code 39) when I follow the new hardware wizard on restart.  Whatever the problem is, it is affecting all of these items.

Does this offer any more clues?