Don't underestimate the old mspaint program. It can be surprisngly capable in sufficiently motivated hands.

But.. you are right, that something major is going wrong, and it is nearly certain that the updated sound driver is at the bottom of it. I normally do not update drivers, operating under the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought, but in this case I was getting system crashes (blue screen followed by a restart) and Windows crash recovery information was indicating it had something to do with the audio driver. A check of the driver showed it to be dated about four years before Vista even hit the market, so an update seemed in order.

Tony, remember when you sent me version 6.0.6001.18000 of the mspaint.exe program in the admittedly forlorn hope that my copy of the program might be corrupted? Well... if I go to Control Panel-->Device Manager-->Sound Video & Game Controllers-->C-Media PCI Audio Device-->Driver-->Driver Details I get a window showing four lines:

C:\Windows\System32\cmudax3.DLL
C:\Windows\system32\drivers\cmudax3.sys
C:\Windows\sysstem32\drivers\dmk.sys
C:\Windows\system32\drivers\portcls.sys

Highlighting any one of the four lines gives additional information in the bottom of the dialog box, such as (for the second line):

Provider: C-Media Inc
File Version: 6.12.8.1733 (that's what I downloaded)
Copyright: C-Media Inc. 1998-2007
Digital Signer: Not digitally signed

Okay, I list all this tedious and probably not useful information just as stage setting for the third and fourth lines. If I highlight those lines, I get information at the bottom of the dialog box as follows:

Provider: Microsoft Corporation
File Version: 6.0.6001.18000 (longhorn_rtm.080118-1840)
Copyright: Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved
Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows

Exact same information for both line 3 and line 4. Does that 6.0.6001.18000 sequence ring any bells with you? If not, please go back and look at the third paragraph (not including the quote) of this post.

Things are beginning to cascade, I think. Last night I had audio (greatly improved over the previous sound card driver, BTW) and this morning I have none. If I go into the configure utility for the driver, I can test the audio and each speaker (Left, Right, Subwoofer) responds, but Windows Media Player does not play audio. The program loads and displays and the slider advances but no sound comes out. Same for Nero. Same for You Tube. Same for QuickTime. Same for Line In from the empeg. Same for iTunes. You get the idea. And no, "Mute" is not selected, at least not anyplace I can find. The only thing I have done is let my Tunebite program run overnight, changing DRM'ed WMA files to MP3's. Hmmm... if I load Tunebite back up I get a dialog box saying:

Warning:
Tunebite's High-speed dubbing driver has wrongly been set as default sound device. This setting is erroneous. Other applications will run without sound. Open the control panel and set your actual default device to restore proper sound settings.


I suppose there is a minute, outside possibility that this might be a small, contributing factor to my sound (i.e., lack thereof) problem. Let's check and see... Yes, that helped considerably. Maybe the problems are not cascading after all. I should have thought of the Tunebite thing, since I had to terminate the program in mid-process this morning (8 of the 24 simultaneous threads had locked up).

So, I guess that just leaves me with mspaint.exe not working, and the highly suspicious circumstance of the mspaint.exe drivers being present in the driver description area that belongs to my sound card.

Something wonky [technical term] is going on here. How do I fix it?

tanstaafl.