Editing UAC in registry corrupted my sound device

I am desperate for help here T_T
A few days ago I was editing registry keys related to UAC
basically I edited this key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\EnableLUA setting its value to 0
This basically makes everything execute with administrative privileges (reboot required).
It worked fair enough and I was done trying it out so I just changed back the changes I did to the keys in that registry directory.
After a few reboots I noticed that the sound wasn't working and the sound icon had a red X on it and said: "No Audio Output Device is installed." when you hover on it.
I checked the drivers, updated, did everything possible I found online, but it never fixed itself...
Until I stumbled on a post which I think is the closest thing to what I am experiencing:
Fixing a customer problem: s WebLog
Also, I tried live booting into a linux os to check if it is a hardware problem but it works just fine with that.
Please help, I know there is something wrong, not to mention that I also experience trouble with some programs which now say something like:
"The program does not have permission to access the profile. Please adjust your file system permissions and try again."
its off topic but I thought I'd mention it

Hi and welcome.

Have you tried performing a system restore to a restore point before you edited the registry?

pbcopter said:

Hi and welcome.

Have you tried performing a system restore to a restore point before you edited the registry?

yes i have, but unfortunately no restore points that dated before the incident were present, i had no backup of the registry as well

mitchell65 said:

I know it's too late now but it is highly recommended to ALWAYS back up your registry before making any changes.

thanks, you can say I learned that the hard way

mrjimphelps said:

First of all, the fact that everything works fine in Linux tells me that there is no hardware problem; therefore the problem is in Windows.

Second, since it is some sort of permissions issue, I'll take a guess here and say that when you edited the registry to always run with administrative privileges, something got reset in your audio program to require administrative privileges. However, when you reversed your registry edit, the reversal didn't work its way to the audio program. You could test this by logging out, then logging into Windows as an administrator, to see if things improve when you are logged in as an administrator, i.e., with full permissions.

You could try reinstalling your audio program. Perhaps that will fix it.

The fact that it says that the program doesn't have permissions tells me

For some ill reason I couldn't get the audio to work even after I disabled the EnableLUA key which should again make everything execute as administrator. Now I don't know what to do anymore

mitchell65 said:

I have just read through this thread again and really can only conclude that a complate re install of Windows is the only sure fire way of resolving this issue!!

i have no copy of windows 7, i cant download one because of OEM