Maximum PC

Hello,

This is my first post here - looks like a great place.

I'm having a problem with my sound card. You should know that I built this machine a few years ago and I know my way around it and PCs in general. Also, I searched the FAQ here going back over a year and could find nothing like this problem.

Here's what I've got:

mobo: Gigabyte GA P35 - DS3L

ram: DDR2 4GB PC6400C5C DU CO (2X2GB)

PS: 500 watt

OS: XP SP3

Now, I had an Emu 0404 sound card in it. It also had an Nvidia Geforce video card. I forget the number but it doesn't matter because I replaced it with a ATI Radeon HD 5670 - 1gb card. When I installed it everything worked fine. However, the next day there was no sound. I checked everything I could think of to correct the problem with no luck. I had been having some latency issues with the card and finally decided that it had died. Interestingly, when the card's software mixer was open and I attempted to play a sound the meters moved as if all was fine - but no output. I checked all the wires to and from the card, they were all correct.

So I bought a new card; an M Audio Audiophile 2496 which is a pretty standard card and good enough for my needs. I installed it and its drivers but still had no sound. Again, the meters on its mixer were active when attempting to play a sound. So I went checking again and in Control Panel / Sound devices all the drivers checked out, no problems. But when I was about to leave that page I noticed that on the first tab, Volume, the volume was turned all the way down. Moreover, it was grayed out and could not be changed. There were also two checkboxes grayed out: Mute and the one that shows the volume slider in the Systray (neither were checked).

So I'm wondering, is this a Windows problem? And if so how do I fix it? Or could my motherboard be the culprit? I've looked at mobos and can get one similar enough to use my other stuff - CPU, Ram, etc. but I don't want to buy one if the problem can be fixed in Windows, or by some other software issue.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ken