Windows 7: No Sound. PC not regestering drivers or card itself.

Windows 7 64bit
5.1 Surround Rocketfish

My computer is not registering a sound device.

It does not show up in the sound options
It does not show up in device manager not as an unknown device or audio.
My device's driver installation program could not sense it.
Ive tried unplugging the card and then plugging it back it.
Ive done a system restore to a time where the audio worked (the day before) and the sound still doesn't work.
I plugged my headphones into another source and they do work.



However, usually I have 2 devices shown, one is a generic HDMI blah blah device which I don't use and the other is the card itself which goes into my headphones. Now my main device is gone and its rather disturbing. Sadly the HDMI device is not outputting to the card or any of the other green audio ports.

What I noticed when I rolled back to a previous restore is that my computer had to reinstall this ghost driver each time but didn't install anything else. Now, I rolled back to when I updated my Nvidia 9800gt card's drivers to the latest build (January 2011). Before I did this my sound was fine. I did some investigating and found out that it updated support for HDMI sound. Could my sound be going through the HDMI to my monitors when I do NOT have speakers. Is there a way to disable such a feature. If not, then what could possibly be causing my sound/card not to work.

Thanks

Lol registering*