I ran some Windows updates and updated the BIOS on my Shuttle SB51G a few days ago, and ever since the sound has quit working. In fact, Windows says I don't have any audio devices at ALL. Not only that, but it now thinks I have a PCI Modem (which I don't). I've tried backing off the Windows updates, and going back to an older BIOS with no success. Has anyone else seen something like this?

Here's what Device Manger shows, remember, I don't have any kind of modem in the system at ALL. Grr...

have you tried pointing the 'pci modem' to the soundcard drivers?

try taking the sound card out and restarting in safe mode. Then choose to show hidden devices in device manager. There might be soem references to the card(s) there which should be removed.
Shut down and restart in normal mode to make sure everything is OK.
Shut down and re-insert the cards, in different slots to be sure the OS thinks they're different and re-install the drivers manually if possible.
If this doesn't work you may have to manually remove the drivers (try c:\%windir%\inf) and go thru the process again.

hope this helps

Yeah, forgot to mention that. I've forced it to install with two different drivers and neither one works. Windows insists it's a modem, and that I have no audio device.

Can't remove the sound card, it's an on-board chipset. But I have done what you said. I deleted everything audio related when booted up in safe mode, and when I rebooted Windows still insisted that I had a modem. I've tried removing the INF files as well.

did you disable onboard sound in bios?

You tried removing the entry in device manager, rebooting and letting it redetect it?

Yup.

Windows still thinks it's a modem. I'm about to wipe out the drive and install Windows from scratch to see if that does anything. I really don't want to, but it might be the only way to fix this.

HA! I got it.

I went back to the latest BIOS, set the default BIOS settings. Turned off the onboard audio in the BIOS.
Then, booted up and removed everything in the INF folder. Then booted up with the Windows XP CD and ran a "Restore." After Windows was back up I went back into the BIOS and turned on the onboard chipset and reboot into Windows and installed the drivers. Now it works.

What I don't get is what the hell caused all that in the first place. Oh well, at least it works now. Thanks for all the suggestions. I was ready to kick start kicking it around the room.

good [censored]

err... good deal

Sorry that this was a bit late, but check out Unknown Devices

Nice. That'll definitely come in handy in the future. Thanks!

What caused it is that Microsloth still hasn't quite gotten the whole plug and pray thing right.

To be honest, I think plug n pray is flawed. When it does work then it's great, when it doesn't then you'll get driven mad.
I've seem systems where the BIOS wants it one way and Windows wants it another. And you get stuck in an endless reboot cycle as each reconfigures it and restarts. Each one thought it was being intelligent and configuring the card properly.
In the end we had to force Windows to use the BIOS settings. Even though the PNP OS option was turned on in the BIOS which should have made the BIOS ignore it all and let the OS configure it, it kept doing something mystical to the PCI registers.

The "new" method now is ACPI which is even more useless. It relies on you embedding a chunk of interpreted code into the BIOS and having a huge bloated ACPI interpreter run it. In theory this would allow you to configure the device using anything that supported ACPI. However, the manufacturers still think the whole world runs Windows because they hack together something so that it'll boot up in Windows and then declare it done even if it's still buggy as hell.

Give me back dipswitches!

PNP works wonderfully under Linux, where you can define exactly how you want all the options set. It's just as good or better than DIP switches. Windows, as usual, is a big opaque crock.