Industrial said:
Wow, it just happened again. About once a week, at completely random
my sound fails with this error message. It is easily fixed with a
restart or system restore, but I seriously wanna figure out the
etiology behind this weirdness.
My sound devices are definitely hooked up, installed and appear fine
on the Device list. Does anyone know of a way to probe further? I
wanna crack down on whatever the hell's causing this.
Someone with that error here, claims to have solved it by reinstalling
the sound driver. I don't believe in miracles - usually something
obvious like that, has no effect.
http://forums.techguy.org/multimedia/470499-solved-sound-card-error-88780078-a.html
The sound driver, is the one for the sound card or built-in sound chip.
Typical company names are CMedia, RealTek, Sigmatel (IDT), SoundMax
(analog.com).
*******
There are some kinds of special software, that can interfere with your
sound.
For example, in-game voice software. While you're playing a game,
you talk into a microphone and the other players on your team
can hear you. That involves adding echo suppression to the audio
subsystem (that's so you don't get a squeal of feedback from the
computer speakers to the microphone).
Some telephony software (Skype?) also adds echo suppression, and
apparently some of that stuff remains running even when you
aren't using the application.
So for general weirdness, there are a few things like that to
look out for. Regular applications, like say a music player,
shouldn't need to do that.
*******
When you see references to "DirectSound", as far as I know
that is part of DirectX. You can reinstall DirectX as much
as you want. DirectX can't be made to go backwards, so
installing DirectX 7 on top of DirectX 9, should not
do anythihg. If you install DirectX 9 on top of DirectX 9,
there should be no effect either. So if you wanted to, it's
generally safe to reinstall that Microsoft package. I don't see
a reason to do it, but thought I'd mention it.
In general, when looking at the DirectX download page, the descriptions
and what you get, can be deceiving. Sometimes, they give you
software for the wrong OS (DirectX 9c is the last one for WinXP).
So if you download a package, and the installer complains that
the OS is the wrong version, then you'll know that what it's saying
is true. The idea is, they no longer give a rat's ass about WinXP users,
with respect to DirectX. So you have to search around, to find out
what to do. It wasn't always that bad.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...roductID=9C954C37-1ED1-4846-8A7D-85FC422D1388
Paul