No Sound (broken) on Gateway MX6437

Move this if it is not the correct forum, I wish there was a troubleshooting forum.

My daughter just called and said the sound was not working on her Gateway laptop. (WinXP Home). It is about two months old. It worked fine originally. She said it stopped working about the time she installed Google Earth, but that seems likely unrelated.

I had her check the obvious things - Speaker icon is in the taskbar, Sound is not muted, volume is turned up. Sound does not work with CD-player Audio or normal system sounds. Device Manager shows all the codecs under Sound but does NOT show "Integrated sound card" or anything like that. I had her go to Gateway's site and download the Audio Drivers. She clicked Setup and it gave an error about not being able to load Conexant Modem sound. Have seen this on other sytems with no problems. Re-booted but still no sound. Tried to force Windows to Add the sound card manually but coudn't figure out how to do that over the phone.

My wife had a similar problem (but not identical) problem on a Win98 desktop. It did list the sound card in hardware, but did not have a speaker icon. I got it working (after re-installing Windows failed) by booting into Safe Mode, removing everything under Sound in Device Manager, going into Windows Set-up, removing and installing the Multimedia option and re-loading the audio drivers, but not sure that will help in this case.

I imagine doing a system restore would fix it, or I might just format and reinstall the OS to get a clean system without all the bloatware that came with it, but this would be a last resort, as I am not sure what she has added to the system that would be lost.

May also try to find a previous system restore point and see if that is any help.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!