Plug and Play, Audio service, and device manager all not working

I have a Home Premium 64bit and about 6 months ago my laptop's audio stopped working. The speaker icon disappeared from the notification bar, but it is still an option under customize, but it only says the audio service is not running. Also the Windows Media Player opens for a few seconds before closing with no errors or any explanation. Just sudden exit. I can't play audio through headphones or online. I've tried to see my devices manager but it comes up blank as if nothing is there and with My Devices and Printers it loads and freezes in place. I've left it up for days before and it never loaded.

I only recently tried to fix it myself because I don't have enough to be overcharged for something simple at a shop. I've gone into the regedit and everything is there. Under services though, the Plug and Play says automatic but it's greyed out and I can't change it, the service status says stopped and when I click start says "windows could not start the Plug and Play service on Local Computer. Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified." When I try to start the Windows Audio under services it says "Windows could not start the Windows Audio service on Local Computer. Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start." I've seen from my Googling that all the audio and device manager and based on the Plug and Play and that might be why nothing's working, but I'm completely stuck now.

Thanks for any help.

I was afraid it would come down to a factory reset. Thankfully the laptop never had been used too much file wise. I've tried the back up option under control panel but it says the dependency service or group failed to start. If I factory reset it but take any files I have to a flash drive is it ok without backing it up? Or is there some deep file stuff that needs to be saved?

I factory reset and everything is working again. I saved all my files and restored it. Thanks for the help!

emilymarie21 said:

I have a Home Premium 64bit and about 6 months ago my laptop's audio stopped working. The speaker icon disappeared from the notification bar, but it is still an option under customize, but it only says the audio service is not running. Also the Windows Media Player opens for a few seconds before closing with no errors or any explanation. Just sudden exit. I can't play audio through headphones or online. I've tried to see my devices manager but it comes up blank as if nothing is there and with My Devices and Printers it loads and freezes in place. I've left it up for days before and it never loaded.

I only recently tried to fix it myself because I don't have enough to be overcharged for something simple at a shop. I've gone into the regedit and everything is there. Under services though, the Plug and Play says automatic but it's greyed out and I can't change it, the service status says stopped and when I click start says "windows could not start the Plug and Play service on Local Computer. Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified." When I try to start the Windows Audio under services it says "Windows could not start the Windows Audio service on Local Computer. Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start." I've seen from my Googling that all the audio and device manager and based on the Plug and Play and that might be why nothing's working, but I'm completely stuck now.

Thanks for any help.

I know this is an old post, but it shows up at the top of google searches for this problem and I wanted to post my solution.

I had this problem, and it extended to ALL devices not just USB. The problem turned out to be that I had installed a half-arsed program that incorrectly modified the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath, which normally defaults to "%SystemRoot%\inf".


They tried to add their own directory to the path, but the fools rewrote the key as REG_SZ instead of REG_EXPAND_SZ, which is necessary whenever the string contains an environmental variable.

Every time installation of a new device was attempted, the following error would appear in C:\Windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log

dvi: Enumerating INFs from path list '%SystemRoot%\inf'
inf: The path %SystemRoot%\inf\*.* is missing!


Consequently, NO device would plug an play, including any system devices one might uninstall to try and force a fresh install. Not knowing about the above bug, when I updated several drivers, my system blue screened because several system devices "disappeared", including the system drive.

Once I used the system recovery tool to install a restore point prior to the attempted driver upgrades and then figured out the problem, I deleted the old DevicePath key an made a new one with the correct data type and that fixed everything. (While I was at it, I set the DevicePath back to the default value and uninstalled the offending program.)