I reformatted my brother's old computer so I can use it when I'm at home (he built a new computer). It's a custom-built computer with an Abit A7N mother board, Athlon XP 3200+ processor, 512 megs of DDR400 RAM (Corsair ValueSelect if you care), as well as an MSI FX500XT video card, a 120 gig IDE hard drive (of some sort, too lazy to check). Most importantly for this whole issue, it has a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card. Speakers are old Yamaha 2.1s (YST-MS201s)

So, anyway, before I reformatted it, all the sound worked. Then I formatted, installed windows, and, as expected, a bunch of devices in the device manager were question marks. No biggy, it's a typical windows installation. I installed all the drivers from the Abit site that were applicable to the motherboard (except for the IDE drivers; this means I installed SMBus, GART, Ethernet, and a couple other drivers). Then I installed the nForce2 chipset drivers (which included sound drivers of some sort), and then installed the SoundBlaster drivers AND kX audio drivers (they're third party audio drivers). restarted and still the multimedia audio controller, SMbus, and "PCI Input Device" were not working in the device manager. Installed Realtek AC'97 audio and nothing else worked, then basically went back and uninstalled all the sound-related drivers I had installed using Driver Cleaner Pro to remove the metric fuckton of registry shit that kX had installed. Installed the Creative drivers from their website auto-update and the Multimedia Audio Controller was still not working (not a question mark at this point, but it has an exclamation point next to it). I started installed AC'97 again, went into Windows/Temp, pulled the drivers directly out of the temp folder and then used device manager to try and manually install the drivers for the device by selecting the exact driver I wanted to use and it couldn't install it.

So, now the question is...what next?

If you don't want to use the AC'97 crap, disable it in the bios. Then you shouldn't have any issues with that.

Then yeah, its all about installing the drivers, make sure you have the newest version. I think these are:
http://files.europe.creative.com/manualdn/...GY2_1_84_50.exe

Remove any old ones, or uninstall any soundblaster devices that are installed before you run the driver pack.

I went to kX on my other computer to avoid AC'97, but this computer didn't work with kX so I'm back to square one. I'll try the drivers you gave me, as well as check out the BIOS.

Yeah I was just going to say that if you're using the audigy, be sure to disable the other one in the BIOS or else you can run into problems. And I've had weird problems with Creative drivers at times. I usually install the ones on the CD first, make sure those work, and then grab the new ones from the website. Just because sometimes I had problems with the newer ones crashing my computer and that, so it might be worth to check that.

Try installing the nForce drivers WITHOUT SWIDE support. On some machines (ones at work anyway) they didn't seem to like creative cards.

Ended up taking the Audigy 2 ZS out, unplugged the front audio ports on the mobo, and then restarted the computer and just let window find the necessary drivers automatically. It couldn't find the multimedia audio controller on its own, but I got the Realtek 638 drivers from their website and installed those manually. It all works now.

Yea i hate that AC97 crap...
so damn annoying, had to disable it and then install my creative sound card drivers i had.