I ran into a similar problem. About a month ago I formatted and partitioned
a new hard drive. This is a new system that I built at the time. A Pentium
mobo, running a K6 AMD 233 mg chip. I am running Win 98.

I reinstalled all my programs and had no problems with the sound, CDRom MIDI
or WAV.
Over the weekend I realized that I hadn't reinstalled Norton Anti-Virus 4.0.
After the install I noticed that my WAV sounds had disappeared. In Control
Panel I was informed that something was running my sound card. CDRom or MIDI
were not effected. Also, I could not get Real Audio to initialize. Kept
getting a Error 50 which essentially it the same as that mentioned above.

On a hunch I uninstalled Norton and everything was normal again. I
reinstalled it and as the Screen comes up a Norton Task Bar appears in the
lower left hand corner of the screen. If I click on the X immediately it
closed Norton and all the sounds work. Disabling it on the lower right task
bar does not work.

I provide Tech Support and we receive a a large computer retailer and we
receive a number of similar calls and can't find anything wrong. I am
waiting for another call on this to see if this will solve the problem on
other computers or if the problem is indigenous to my system. Anyone else
experienced this???

Patrick Black wrote:

> First off in Windows 95, goto the Control Panel then double click on the
> Mulitmedia
> device.  There you can specify the sound card  that you wish to output
> sound.
>
> --Patrick Black
>
> On Sat, 18 Apr 1998 20:35:25 -0700 JMB <[log in to unmask]>
> writes:
> >My friend and I just got two identical machines (Pentium 233, 32M,
> >4GHD,
> >motherboard is a PCChips 575 with on-board sound).  Each machine has a
> >different problem, and before we take them back to the retailer, we
> >just
> >want to make sure we are not doing something wrong because we are not
> >familiar with Win95 (OSR2) and its inner workings.
> >
> >
> >Problem 2 appears to be hardware related.  Machine #1 has no sound
> >when
> >win95 loads, you run a wave or midi file from the media folder, or
> >when
> >logging into AOL, you don't get the "You've got mail" voice.  However,
> >put an audio CD Rom into the machine and the soundpro software package
> >plays the music without a problem.  We have looked through almost all
> >of
> >the properties and resources tabs.  Everything says the system is okay
> >and no conflicts.  Is it possible that we have overlooked a place to
> >look at to see if something is turned on or off?
> >
> >Problem 1 was software related and posted to PCSoft.
> >
> >--
> >Jean Bourvic
> >
>
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