Need help. Vista Bugs and Problems Discuss Need help. in the Windows Vista forums; Hi, I have a problem with Vista. I am running Home Premium. I have a Q6600 processor, 4GB of Corsair ram, 8800Ultra video card, Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty audio ...

[tdjoyce]

Hi, I have a problem with Vista.
I am running Home Premium.
I have a Q6600 processor, 4GB of Corsair ram, 8800Ultra video card, Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty audio card, a couple of 1TB samsung HDD and a couple of samsung DVD writers.
The problem : I started getting BSODs and tracked the cause to faulty ram. I removed the faulty ram, two 1GB matched modules, leaving me with 2GB's of ram. When I rebooted I found that the taskbar icons for the network and speaker were disabled.
Vista no longer appears to see the network status, although everything is functioning as normal. The audio is no longer functioning, however. The device manager states everything is functioning properly, but the volume mixer states that there is "no audio device installed".
I have checked for viruses, reinstalled the hardware, reinstalled the software, nothing resolves the problem.
I am wondering if it is a registry problem?
Removing the ram seems to have screwed up Vista somehow, I should not be surprised with a MS OS. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Znod]

What a mess. Ugh. I would do a system restore to before you removed the RAM.

[tdjoyce]

After trawling through log files, I found a clue that pointed towards corrupted registry files. After hearing of some bad outcomes when doing system restores, this was a last resort. It was the only course of action though. So I did the system restore and luckily this time it worked. The network and speaker functions have been restored. So for anyone who has a similar problem, this could fix it.

[Znod]

System restore is a very reliable feature of Windows--more so than Windows, itself. I am glad it worked.