I don't believe this is a driver issue for sure, but it seems that Windows has some issue. My computer has been running the same for the last year...but now all of a sudden in the last 2 days, when I run a game the first time, the sound is fine. When I exit that game and try to join another, the sound is gone and when I click the volume control on my taskbar it says "There are no active mixer devices available. To install mixer devices, go to Control Panel, click Printers and Other Hardware, and then click Add Hardware. This program will close now."

Then i go to control panel and go to Sounds and Audio Devices and everything is grayed out saying "no audio device detected". Obviously there is something wrong considering I have a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Value sound card. I believe this started happening after I was UnRARing a large file and somehow all my windows XP bar went back to the windows 98 type. I don't know if that has anything to do with it but it seems the times coincide.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm getting sick of restarting my computer just to join a game.

PS. Even after the sound goes off in games, there is still sound in regular windows procedure like logging in and error messages, even Ventrilo (VOIP sort of program) still allows sound.

I had one of the Audigy line cards in my pc before I upgraded to the X-Fi series. What I found out that the Audigy card for some reason didn't like XP downloads or updates. What I had to do was to completely uninstall the card, reboot and delete any file folders that remained. Once that was done, I had to reinstall from the cd disk provided. Then go to Creative website and download the latest drivers for that card.
It seemed to take care of the problem (until another wacky security download from Microsoft screwed it up again.)

I just realized that I get an error message when this starts.

"Generic Host Process for Win32 Services has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

I have the error report screenshot if it helps:

It says in the technical information contents:
"C:\DOCUME~1\AKHILE~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER5a55.dir00\svchost.exe.mdmp"
"C:\DOCUME~1\AKHILE~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER5a55.dir00\appcompat.txt"

By reading another forum about this issue, I found out a fix is to just go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services and Start "Windows Audio". Any idea why this might be disabling itself?