Sounds stop working on computer randomly
I ran into an issue today where the sound on a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop running Windows XP Professional kept randomly not working. Even restarting did not fix. I checked all the normal places to make sure it was setup properly. In windows everything was fine. I reinstalled the sound card driver and it started working but then later in the day stopped. Turns out Real Player had been opened, the volume set all the way down and then closed. Even though it was closed Real Player was still running in the background processes and hence was controlling the sound. Ending task on the process or raising the volume in the application fixed the issue. Hopefully this will help someone trying to solve an inexplicable issue with the sound on their laptop or desktop not working.
