Lost sound, but windows thinks I still have it

[Cherribomb]

My speakers and headset work just fine when plugged into another PC, neither work on mine in any port. This happened suddenly: I did a Windows Update to SP1 yesterday, and last night I put it on hibernate like usual. But when I woke up, my PC seemed to have restarted itself for an unknown reason; it was on and my taskbar was missing things. And the sound was gone.

Windows still THINKS it is playing sound, though. If I go into the volume control, the green bar still rises and falls when something is playing. I tried a system restore to before the update, didn't work. I updated the audio driver from my motherboards website, didn't work. The speakers are showing up as the audio output device.

This isn't the first time I've had this problem, I've had it before when doing clean installs of Win7. Usually it would happen after most of the updates were done, and went away after a few days. The best lead I ever got was that it seemed like a Microsoft Update for Internet Explorer seemed to fix it for some reason... but that is not available to me as an update at this time, so I cannot try it.

I'm really at a loss here, what could the problem be?

 

[bassfisher6522]

Right click your sound icon and select playback. What is your default setting? In the same window under sounds tab at the top, what sound scheme are you using? Should be set to "windows default". Again in the same window under communications, what is ticked? It should be "Reduce the volume by of other sounds by 80%" ticked.

 

[Cherribomb]

Speakers default, sound scheme default, communications settings default.