Windows XP sound problems

Hope that someone can help with this as it is driving me mad.

I have Windows XP home fully uptodate and am having trouble with sound. Video and music are ok, but files embedded in web pages, such as Youtube and BBC have no sound, and in the sound scheme in the control panel, the play button is greyed out so that nothing can be played.

I have done some searching, and tried the following :

run sfc /scannow result nothing found

uninstall and re-install flash player result no change

install k-lite codec pack This made some changes and removals during the installation, but when I run the tweaktool and ask it to fix broken sound it return the error "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 error creating registry key RegCreateKeyEx failed code 5"

I have tried following the instruction found earlier on this site for the registry fix by going to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 . When I right click the right pane and select New Stringvalue and enter 'wavemapper' (without quotes) it tells me that the value name already exists. Using Edit Find to locate 'wavemapper' it finds nothing ! I know little about the registry, but this seems odd.

Can anyone please help in simple language, because I am really a simple soul.

 

They tend to rely on java .. do you have that installed and working?

 

Yes Java 1.6 15 is installed and working fine.

 

is your sound card driver up to date

 

Yes, sound drivers are ok. This problem has only appeared within the past week.

 

I did notice adobe doing some flash related updates on a repair system a week or so ago... is flash enabled in browser settings?

 

Yes - no problem with flash apart from the lack of sound

 

check your settings in your sound manager

 

Settings seem fine to me. I certainly have not changed them.

 

i understand ! i am having problem with my sound cutting out and i don't know what too do there either. The only thing i come up with is check with a computer tec.

 

It's usually a driver issue. Probably you should use other drivers, at least try some.

 

Was your sound ever working before? Is this a new machine? And you probably can't see those files because they are hidden.

 

Two weeks ago, everything was working fine. Now things are slowly crumbling away. First it was the sound, then My Computer couldn't find anything and explorer would not load. So I have taken the drastic action of backing up everything, reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling windows and programs slowly but surely.

This thread can now be considered closed.