system-wide sound failure

Okay... I'm an absolute wiz at computers, but I have very little knowledge of XP. Here's the problem:

The comp just won't play sounds sometimes. This morning, everything was fine. I played a couple CDs. Everything went well. I came back to my comp in the afternoon to find that sound would not play. Absolutely nothing will play. No CDs, mp3s, midi, wav, ...nothing. It doesn't even matter if I change players.

WMP9 gives me, "0xC00D11BA: Cannot play the file "

So, I went through all the troubleshooting(which only angered me, since it was no help whatsoever). I went to the microsoft site and searched there... nothing.

Then, I checked 'Device Manager'. Well, under 'Microsoft Kernel Wave Audio Mixer', it says...

"The driver for this device might be corrupted, or your system may be running low on memory or other resources. (Code 3) "

I'm not running low on memory or resources. However, it might be corrupted. The last time this happened, a troubleshooter led me to believe that something was wrong with "MCI audio" or somthing like that... Anyway, I re-installed it as suggested. As you might guess, things are worse.

Additionally, there is a continous buzzing sound comming from the speakers whenever they are on. (I don't know if it's related...)

Another thing is that the windows update site keeps trying to give drivers for my sound card. I updated my drivers from the manufacters website. So, it wants me to install old drivers. Figure that one out...

Anyway, this is driving me absolutely insane. Please, please, help me.

 

I almost forgot...

restarting seems to make the problem go away, at least... temporarlily.

I'm hoping someone here can tell me how to get rid of this problem entirely.

 

Problems getting worse

My comp just seems to get worse by the second. Now I'm having trouble accessing my CD drives. All "autorun" programs work, but associated programs can't recognize disks. It's really weird.

So, I tried to use system restore. It has failed for every date that I have available. After my comp restarts, I get a message like, "System Restore could not be completed. Run system restore again. "

I tried to re-install my audio drivers, and... partial success. My CD drives are responding again, but all my tray icons have disappeared. Except for my network connections.