[Sever]

It seems my fear of the almighty sys-restore was ill-founded. No problems to report. Back to square one i suppose. Still can't get sound to run while playing FEAR. I've tried the second suggested option of installing the codec included with the game but no help there either. I believe i had similar problems while playing X2 and eventually had to convert the entire sound file into a non-mp3 format which took a lot of hoop jumping to accomplish. Seems to be that mp3 game sounds don't work. Perhaps it's a problem with one of my existing codecs?..

Edit: Somewhere in XP there's a function which enables the reshuffling of the order of audio codecs. Can someone refresh my memory?..

Still couldn't get the SB driver to update, btw. Don't know what's going on with that.