Win 98 SE.

A friend who actually know less about computers than I do, is having
problems with his computer. (400 mhz AMD) He is not sure when the problem
started but now it does not play normal Windows sounds.

However, it will play audio CDs. but when he puts a CD in, WMP opens and
gives a failure message. (perhaps it says path not found.) but if he then
clicks on play, it does. ITOH.. he said something about not thinking that
WMP was doing the playing.?? I do not know why he thinks this. (We are
communicating via email and phone.)

At any rate..... A search for *.wav only found two files. Search for
volume finds only a shortcut to volume control. Clicking on the shortcut
does nothing. The volume icon has disappeared from systray.

I had him put a volume shortcut on desktop and it's properties show the
correct target but the target file seems to be missing.

So.... I told him to reinstall win 98 and let me know how it goes. BTW...
I told him that if he reinstalled over the existing win, his settings
will be retained.

However, he now tells me that the Win CD says that NAV and bios AV
prevent reinstall. So.. he disabled NAV in msconfig but cannot find any
AV setting in the bios setup.

Therefore... he still cannot reinstall.

If this is the needed approach, I will work with him to find the info on
his bios. At this point he does not know. He only knows that it is an AMD
processor.

As I said, he does not know when the problem started, but it might have
been when he updated media player to ver 9.

Oh yeah... Not surprisingly... in control panel/sounds... none of the
previews play anything.

Questions... What do you think happened?(thus to prevent it from
re-occurring)  Do you think reinstall is necessary? Will it fix the
problem? If reinstalling does not fix it, then suggestions?

Is WMP ver 9 even usable on that slow of a machine?

TIA
--
Bill

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I
want to go where they went." -Will Rogers