This is great, I appreciate the response. :-)

Robh - I hadn’t thought of deleting the M-Audio in control panel. I’ll write it down as a possible step.

John – I have a fully registered copy of Win-XP and have been receiving OS upgrades since I first turned up the PC. Keep in mind that the Audio card does work after a reboot.

Rharv – Power Supply… excellent idea! I will look at my Mother Board manual I’m almost positive there is a power monitor included in the BIOS. I’ll check that right away…

Mac – Fragmented HD, Corrupt Driver, Faulty PSU or defective Sound Card… good summary this is very helpful.

Now that the PSU has been mentioned it reminds me of something that happened a couple of weeks ago. I had been using my PC for about an hour when suddenly the monitor went black. I could hear a loud ticking in the speakers and immediately suspected the monitor Power Supply. I quickly disconnected the power supply from the AC… the ticking did not stop. But I plugged it back in and everything went back to Normal. This happened twice over a two day period but the second time I just left it alone and the video restored in about five seconds. Both times it had just started raining and the incident reminded me of our old TV set… it used to start arching when we had high humidity or it was raining. I wonder if the dust and moisture set up a similar situation in the PC Power Supply. BTW, I live in Phoenix AZ so humidity and rain are extremely rare… but we have lots of dust and the combination does bad things around high voltage.

Thank you all for your comments. I truly appreciate the ideas and I will investigate all of them. I’ll let you know how this turns out.

Gale

Mr. G