Series of strange things after latest update cycle

[Guest]

I don't know what happened but I suspect it was Windows Update that caused it.
Last night I had my normal sound on my system. This morning I had none.

I have checked everything I can think of and can't find any problems with
the sound driver(installed several days ago from Realtek) or with any of the
hardware or the wiring.

Collateral problems (symptoms?) are that the silly Microsoft Media Player 11
seems to want to open on its own every now and then and that I can't
successfully restore the system. After trying unsuccessfully to find the
problem I decided to run system restore to go back to the system state late
yesterday. That failed to work despite the system grinding away for a good
while. Thinking it might have had something to do with the restore point I
decided to try another point about 48 hours old. This attempt went through
the same routineand ended the same way, after the reboot I got the message
that the restore had failed.

As for the insistence of Media Player to open every hour or so for no reason
I can't find a hint of a reason.

I checked the list of Microsoft updates that were automatically installed
yesterday and there are four listed. One is definitely not something I need
and a second is highly doubtful. The other two sound like something I may
need but who knows?

I wonder if anyone else has seen similar problems.

I'm running Vista Ultimate 32 Bit on a 64 bit Asus motherboard with a 64 bit
dual core AMD processor and 2 Gigs of Crucial memory.

Any helpful response will be greatly appreciated

 

[John Barnes]

I would begin by uninstalling the Realtek Driver, rebooting, and then
reinstalling it.

 

[Robert Martin]

I had a bad problem after the last update.
Mail would stop working, and the Adobe Reader started acting up.
So I disabled automatic updates, then I did a system restore
to the restore point before the update.
Duh!!
Everything was fine and working ok again, I get up this morning and
the updates had been installed again. I guess I should have disabled the
automatic updates after I did the restore.

Well, anyway all seems to be working with the updates installed the 2nd time

WEIRD!!!!

 

[Rev. Vegetable Lasagne]

I would begin by uninstalling the Realtek Driver, rebooting, and then
reinstalling it.

Yes, I did the same thing to fix a similar problem under XP when a new
fix made the driver for Realtek HD stop working. This was around
February, I think it had something to do with moving dll's around so
they wouldn't always be in the same place.

Just did a search for the old one, and a notice of the problem just came
out today... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935448

 

[Squibbly]

all i can say about my system, is that it seems to be running even better, i
have noticed that there seems to be less thrashing of the hard drive, and
the sound seems alot all round smoother when starting up, also, the problem
with the update of the photo screensaver, has been solved, seemed like a
year had passed before it got out of the screensaver. so more updates are
still needed, lol, not perfect yet, but coming there soon