I have a really weird one tonight. Today we had a LAN party and all of a sudden the sound on a couple PC's stopped working for programs like the games, windows media player, etc. However, when errors would popup (like trying to change the volume settings) you would here the default error chime. Restarting the computers you would here the logoff-login sounds and after a restart the sound would work for a bit in both games and apps and then suddenly stop. Restarting also didn't always fix the problem.

I can't figure this out. If the sound card/driver didn't work then how could we hear sounds from the windows sound scheme? No sound with VLC, windows media player, youtube, games, nothing.

The only thing I can figure out is that this is a bad game crashing the primary driver or some kind of weird virus these PC's might have picked up.