Sound Issues

[rebecca555]

my audio will not work for iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. but the sound does work for windows noises (start-up music, etc) and does work for a tv tuner that i have on the computer (however, I have to adjust the manual but on the speaker to raise/lower the volume, the volume control in the onscreen tuner menu will not change the volume).

i have a dell dimension 4600 with a soundMAX integrated digital audio sound card. I tried unistalling and reinstalling the driver but this did not help. what's strange is that when I look in my system > device manager > Sound, video and game controllers it says the SoundMax is enabled and working properly. But when I go into Control Panel> Sound and Audio Devices it says there is NO audio device.
I haven't made any drastic changes to my computer.
Any ideas what to do?

I also have a svchost.exe that is taking up 99% of my CPU usage, and was wondering if that could be related to my sound problem. Or if I can get rid of it. I have Viruscan and Ad-Aware, and neither have detected any malware, etc and both are up to date.

Any thoughts on that?