Unable to select sound devices

[ITgeek]

I have been poking around the MicroSoft Knowledge Base and these forums and have not found the enswer to my problem, so here I am.

I have a machine with an on-board sound card. The "Sounds and Audio Devices" app in the control panel acts as if there are no sound cards installed. All of the options are greyed out and the list boxes to select default audio devices are empty. When I click the hardware tab I can see my sound card in the VIA integrated sound in the list and it appears to be installed properly.

I disabled the on-board sound in the BIOS and installed an old but known working Sound Blaster Live card. I installed the latest XP drivers and still have the same issue. Device manager says that the device is working properly and if I boot the machine with an Ubuntu Linux Live CD I get sound just fine.

I know that I had this problem in the past on another machine, and it could be fixed by either starting or restarting the "Windows Audio" service. But I tried that without avail.

Can I re-install the audio service, or is there an application that can check for problems with the audio service? I tried running System File Checker "sfc /SCANNOW" but that did not fix the issue.

I would hate to re-install windows on this machine, it belongs to an older Woman who has all kinds of junk on there, including AOL and would probably be a nightmare to back-up.

Any help would be appreciated as I am out of ideas, Thank You!