Windows 7 - Sound Suddenly Stopped Working

Onboard Realtek HD audio on the Asus P6T board.

I noticed last night when I tried to play something the sound wasn't working anymore. It hadn't been restarted in a week, so I'm not sure what could have caused that.

I have ensured playback devices are enabled and I have set both the 5.1 speakers and the C-Media USB headphone/mic audio device to default. Didn't make a difference, no sound coming out of the headphones or speakers.

In the Asus ExpressGate I can go to YouTube and my speakers work fine, so it's gotta have something to do with Windows.

I ran windows troubleshooting on Playing Audio and it says "Hardware changes might not have been detected" with a little yellow exclamation point and no other options but to close. It does say detected next to it though, so I'm not sure.

It happened all of a sudden, so I'm not sure what the deal is. I'm downloading the new Realtek audio drivers stickied at the top of this forum and hopefully that may make a difference.


I checked Device Manager in safe mode and it shows no little yellow exclamations indicating an issue. I cannot pull up Device Manager in regular mode, and I've tried to do a SFC /scannow which also doesn't work.

I also cannot get system restore point to open from the control panel, system, uninstall a program. So somethings farked up with Windows.

Have you run an Anti-virus scan?

Yeah, Avast! didn't come up with anything.