Sounds stopped playing!

[Urdvurk]

Hi,

Some (but not all) of my windows sounds have stopped playing. Some of the sounds that have stopped playing have been replaced with system beeps (one of these is the Empty recycle bin event, which made me notice the problem in the first place). Menu popups and clicks will still play their sounds, however pretty much every other sound event won't. Other sounds (movies, MP3s, etc.) work fine.

I can still see all the sound events in the Control panel / Sounds and Multimedia / Sounds tab, I can still assign sounds to the events, I can still preview (well, sort of) the sound files, but they won't play.

I have disabled the system beep, hoping that doing so might bring the wav sounds back, but that didn't work. I know now that I was foolish to think so.

I read somewhere else that it might be a problem with the registry, in particular with the HKEY_CURRENT_USER/AppEvents tree. Replacing this subtree (with one from another user profile) hasn't solved the problem, however it has sort of narrowed things down a bit because the other, newly made user profile does play all of its sounds correctly, suggesting the problem is somewhere in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive (assuming of course that all user profiles use the same registry components except for the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive).

Right now this is as far as I got. Sounds will play on the new profile I made but not on my own profile. I know it is not a critical problem but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I use Windows 2000 by the way.

Thanks

[Urdvurk]

Hey it's me again.

I've found sort of a solution. As it turns out, if there is a null value registry key in the root of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive (use regedt32.exe) the aforementioned sounds won't play. I forget what it looks like exactly, but removing it should solve the problem.

In my case, the (Default) registry key didn't have a null value: in regedit.exe its value was (-1,1), whatever that means, and in regedt32.exe it also had a value, which has momentarily slipped my mind. Removing the key solved the problem!

...Well, sort of. The Windows start sound still won't play. As it turns out the guy who mailed me this solution had the same effect afterwards.

I think the problem is still in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive because in my Administrator account everything works perfectly. However I can't really be bothered anymore.

Still, if all this sounds familiar to anybody, any tips would be appreciated.

Thanks