I am also experiencing the problem as you describe; the muted video, frozen progress bar, and everything else exactly mirror your symptoms. Sound (at least sound that would rely on some software codec) just stops working with all applications. Like you, I also have a SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio soundcard (standard AC97) so it should be well supported. However, there's a twist... Sound does work from a hardware source. For example, I use a TV tuner card in conjunction with DScaler (I just feed the audio output from the tuner card into the line-in) without any audio problems (even when everything else fails). This leads me to believe that it isn't simply a hardware compatibility issue with Vista. Also, Vista seems to loose audio capabilities after confirmation/error dialogs; however, this may just be my imagination.
This issue has persisted since I started testing Vista Beta 2 and unfortunately is present in Vista Business. As an aside, does anyone else running Vista Business find it impossible to enable Vista's games? For some reason, the games always fail to configure properly and are never made accessible.
Thanks
Hi everyone,
This is sort of a long explanation, but I don't know any other way to describe it:
When I first start up my computer, the sound is working as good as ever, but all of a sudden my sound and everything using sound stops working. iTunes for example works fine, but for some reason, almost randomly it will decide it doesn't want to play the music anymore. I press the play button(which turns into the pause button, implying that it's working), but no music plays and the music progress bar doesn't move.
If I have MSN messenger showing what music is playing on iTunes, it displays the songs changing, but iTunes shows it as if it's frozen, but still "responding".
I tried logging out and I heard the logout chime. When I logged back in, my sound was working again. Then I tried Windows Media Player 11. While iTunes would work at the beginning, Windows Media Player didn't. When I clicked on a song to play, it showed the song as Now Playing, but it didn't play it.
Next, I tried videos. Sometimes both video and sound worked. Other times, only the video played, as if the sound was muted.
Oh, and once sound stopped working on media players, it also stopped working with everything else (Games, MSN or anything else with alert sounds), but since the logout sound worked, I thought some background program must be stopping the sound so I tried ending different tasks, but non of them worked.
I'm using Windows Vista Home Premium.
My soundcard is SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio. It was onboard my ASUS motherboard. When I go to device manager, it says the soundcard has the correct driver.
Has anyone else had a similar problem and/or know a way to fix this?
Thanks.

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