Sound gone after reboot???

My Dell Dimension 4100 is running win ME, and my sounds keep going away. here's the scenario:
At SHUTDOWN, prompt says "Normal.dot already exists.Replace?" I enter "no". "Save As" pops up with Templates folder displayed and NORMAL as "file to be saved-as. I then respond "Cancel". This leads to an open-but-grayed-out MS Word window, with no white document page. I "X" it closed. It AGAIN prompts "Changes have been made affecting global template NORMAL. Save?" I again say "no". This dumps me back to Desktop, where SHUTDOWN is effective. On RE-Boot, All WaveSounds associated with Multi-Media are missing! It takes me several minutes (after Un-and-Re-Installing Multi-Media and Santa Cruz as Preferred Audio device) before it's back to making it's full set of sounds. Is this maybe a registry problem that causes it to keep resetting the defaults?? H E L P, Please.