Windows 7: Not 7 but... Radeon 5570 Audio offed by DirectX? Or MPC

I love this forum so taking a chance by posting on a contraban OS.... the hasbeen Windows XP Pro, on a HP DC7600 I built for HTPC, small cool notebook HD and low profile Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 1GB card. This system worked terrific hooked up to our bigscreen HDTV until today. For whatever reason I was wondering if Media Player Classic might give better results that WMP 11, so downloaded it from download.com. Ran the install, it installed fine, but afterward complained because no DirectX.
[an oversight of mine]
So I went to Microsoft DirectX site and did the webinstall.



Afterward, no more audio via HDMI from the Radeon Card!!!

What happened?
Best way to fix??

My assumption is that something in one of the installs overwrote later/newer files [without asking] with older files and neutered the audio drivers of the ATI chipset.

If that's the case, should I uninstall the ATI Card, then reinstall???

Hey, if the drivers are indeed corrupted, you can simply restore to before you installed directx, just type system restore into the start menu and roll back to when you installed directx, simple :-)

MrNeeds