Ever since about saturday morning, something messed up in my harddrive and
seems to have knocked out some stuff. Right now I have the little exclamation
point next to 3 drivers in device manager under the "sound, video and game
controllers" division:

microsoft kernel audio splitter
microsoft kernel dls synthesizer
microsoft winmm wdm audio compatibility driver

Ever since this happened, none of my sound worked. However, I searched for
the error message that winamp gave me when I tried to play a song, and found
this website with someone who had the same problem:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=1440900

I followed these instructions:


and changed the drop-down list from "Primary Sound Driver" to my actual
video card driver, and my winamp worked again. However, I had to turn the
sound almost all the way to the bottom or I would blow my eardrums out...I
guess it's just way louder for some reason.

My teamspeak was one of the folders that got corrupted when my hard drive
flipped out, and it got removed by check disk. So I just re-downloaded it,
and again it gave me an error message about having no sound driver. So I went
to settings -> options, and changed "sound driver" from "wave" to "direct
sound". Then under "output device" I changed from "Primary Sound Driver" to
my actual sound card option. And it worked, but again the sound was loud
enough to make me deaf so I had to change the output sound to the lowest
possible setting other than "mute", and it's still pretty loud but workable.

So it seems that these workarounds are working ok, but somehow I need to be
able to fix the "Primary Sound Driver" option so it works for everything
else. Because in most programs I can't find where to monkey with sound driver
options, so I can't play GW with sound or watch movies or anything.

I've searched yahoo/google for those 3 drivers that are messed up, but I
can't seem to find anyone who has had a similar problem. Just gleaned that
they're some sort of "ghost" drivers or something...

Anyone have any ideas?