M2N-E SLI audio drivers problem

Hi all,

I have a problem with the mentioned motherboard. The problem is taht the sound just stopped working. All I get is some scraping and cracking in the speakers but only when I play a sound file. Else the speakers are silent. This happened a while ago and that time reinstalling the drivers worked. Recently it happened again, but even reinstalling the drivers wont help. I tried the last version of them from the Asus site and still no luck. I am running Windows Vista, and there were no segnificant software changes on the PC recently.

I also tried turning off hardware acceleration in Winamp, and still get the cracking. Even Windows beep sounds do the crack. So I assume that the board is ok, and that I have to play with the registries to delete the drivers completly. How do I do that. I thought about reinstalling the Windows, but have too many programs for my projects and don't intend to format untill march next year.

So please help me with any advice or direct me to similar known issues.

Thanks in advance and best regarts!