Windows 7: Audio device is disabled - no audio at all.

I'm on the verge of re-installing Windows. Spent the last 4 hours searching on here and other forums for a fix, but can't seem to find any.

It started earlier today, I'd just installed Call of Duty: World at War off Steam, tried to launch it and it kept crashing. Tried a few things, but nothing worked and read it might be a sound driver issue. Tried updating my ASUS Xonar DX drivers to the latest version, but once the PC had restarted I had no sound and a the speaker on the taskbar said there's no output device installed.

Uninstalled these drivers and tried installing the ones I was using and same problem. I opened up playback devices and the default speakers were my monitor as I connect via HDMI from my graphic card to my main monitor. The "set default" option was greyed out and I couldn't change the default speakers unless I disabled the HDMI audio, but still I had no sound.

Tried uninstalling the graphic drivers and re-installing the drivers first, but still nothing. Even when the only audio device was the sound card, there was no sound.

If I troubleshoot, it says the audio device is disabled, even though it isn't. I've checked all the audio services and they're all running. I even tried enabling my onboard audio again, but I still get the same problem of the audio device apparently being disabled.

I ran an sfc /scannow, and that fixed a few things, but still no audio.

Only thing I can think of doing now is just re-installing Windows.

Well I just tried re-installing the onboard audio drivers after the sfc scan, and restarted and the onboard audio works. I've had enough of it for one day, so I'll try my soundcard again tomorrow.

Well I couldn't get it working. Ended up re-installing Windows as there was a few other things I couldn't fix as well, but everything's fine now. Once Windows had finished re-installing, I installed the chipset drivers first, then the audio drivers to avoid any conflicts with the HDMI audio on my graphic card, and then did everything else and it works fine now.

i wonder why you didnt give system restore a shot.

I did just before I formatted. I uninstalled the driver, cleared everything relating to it, then did a system restore. Made sure there was no driver for it still on, then tried reinstalling the driver again but still no go.

It wasn't too much of a problem reinstalling, and it fixed a couple of networking problems I've been having for a couple of months that I wasn't able to fix as well.

How did you manage to fix it? I have the same problem with my onboard sound card: VIA VT1828S can't get no sound at all, I've tried fresh install of driver several times. Please help

I had the same problem. If you use system restore the audio will come back for a little while then it will be disabled again. I think Automatic updates is to blame. My audio was working fine until my pc decided to perform an automatic update.

In the end I did a clean install of windows 7 and disabled automatic updates, so far so good...

[Note: Disabling automatic updates will keep your computer from being up to date. Without automatic updates you will not receive windows security patches for your system]

I got my audio back but I guess I am leaving my self vulnerable without the security patches....