[ajfish]

Guys,
I am having this problem too. It started when some friends said to me that they had lost their sound on their PC. "I'll sort that, 2 minutes at the most!" And that is indeed all it took. I uninstalled the sound card, rebooted, re-installed the drivers when Windows finds the new hardware and left them to it. But then another phone call to the fair lady of the household revealed that "it's not working again Pandy, what's wrong now?". I followed the same procedure and it all worked. I just assumed that perhaps they had loaded some game or something and that had screwed things up. What became apparent was that the "Generic Host Processs for Win32" was appearing quite often when they rebooted. "Oh that always appears, we just click it off" (Where the word click may have been substituted by another word leading to the acronym FIO). Anyway, on further investigation and several hours now messing around with this, this is what happens.
Sound card not working.
Control Panel - Sounds shows no audio device available.
Control Panel - System - Hardware, I unisntall the sound card.
Reboot
System boots, finds new hardware and installs the AC97 sound driver.
Control Panel - Sounds now shows audio device.
Reboot and login as user
I do get the Windows welcome tune and all appears to be normal. So at this point the sound card is working. Then sometimes (and I don't know if this is significant) but the task bar where "Start" is, appears in grey. (You know, like a Win2K or Win98 machine) when normally this would be the XP blue/ Green graphics. I get the hour glass for what seems ages, probably a couple of minutes, before you can select anything from "Start".
I go to Control Panel - Sounds AND NO FLIPPIN AUDIO DEVICE is available!
So the symptoms of what I am seeing here is much the same as you chaps are seeing.
I spent a couple of hours installing updates on Sunday (17/7/05) from the Microsoft site but still the problem exists.
I have run Adaware and HijackThis but can't find anything that stands out that could be causing the problem.
Now I really do need your help, I am preceived by the family as being a bit of a computer Oracle - or was (I have worked in IT for 16 years), but I think they are thinking that I couldn't work a pencil sharpener at the moment with any degree of success. In fact if I hadn't fed their cat this weekend I think I really would be off their Christmas card list, so any help would be very greatly appreciated.
Email direct if you like....erh just HELP!

Andrew