Navigational click vanishes - Office starts dinging!

OK, this is driving me mental and I can't work it out. Hopefully someone
out there has come across it before.

Every so often, and for no apparent reason, my Start Navigation sound will
go away. This is the click sound you get whenever you click on something in
an Explorer window or web page. It's easy enough to fix on the face of it -
open the Sounds control panel, find the Start Navigation entry, which will
be showing a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark, meaning it can't find
the file. Click Browse, select "Windows Navigation Start.wav" and all done.
Easy (doesn't really explain why windows couldn't find it though).

Except...

From that point on, every time I bring up an Open or Save As dialog in
Office 2000, everything I click on produces a Ding! This is the standard
Windows Ding.wav, listed in Sounds as Default Beep. If I then disable
sounds altogether , or assign no sound to Default Beep, the problem remains,
except the PC internal speaker beeps at me instead of the Ding sounding.
The only solution I've found at this point is System Restore, which may or
may not lose me my Start Navigation sound again, depending on when the
Restore Point was made.

Until recently this was only occurring on one of my two user accounts. When
I finally couldn't find a Restore Point that got rid of the Ding AND
preserved the click I deleted the account and recreated it from scratch.

This was OK for about two weeks.

Now it's happening on both accounts and I've lost all my restore points
before yesterday afternoon. What's more System Restore fails to restore to
this point.

Here are the options as I see them:

Upgrade to Office 2007. Not really an option at the moment as Excel 2000 is
the only version the works with a particular spreadsheet I need for work. I
do, however, already have Outlook 2007 as Outlook 2000 doesn't work properly
with Vista. I mention this just in case it may be relevant, although I
doubt it.

Live with the Ding. Can't. It's doing my head in.

Mute all sounds, or turn my amp and speakers off. Yeah, OK, seriously
though...

Live without the click. Do-able, but not really a fix.

Delete both user accounts and wait for it to happen again. Drastic,
probably easier to just reinstall Windows, and no guarantee it won't happen
again unless I find the cause.

Trash Vista and reinstall XP. Again, drastic, but seriously crossing my
mind at the moment. I'd try an in-place upgrade of Vista (AKA repair
install) if I thought it'd help but I can't keep doing this every time if
it's not going to be a permanent fix, and I'm worried it'll cause problems
with some of my older apps, as it did when I first installed it.

Find out from someone with more knowledge than me what's causing it and/or
how to fix both problems. Which brings me here. Hi, everybody!

I'm pretty sure we're looking at registry corruption but am really unsure
how to find what's causing it. Are there any decent open source apps out
there that can track changes to the registry? This might help narrow down
the cause. More than that though, what's causing Office to beep at me? If
I could sort that one out I'd at least have a way of putting things right
when it happens.

I've not yet ruled out some sort of weird hardware or driver problem, and
can install an Audigy card in place of the onboard Realtek HD Audio, but
that seems a bit unlikely to me at the moment and can wait until the 12
month warranty expires.

I'm sure I haven't yet provided nearly enough information about my system
but just wanted to start by explaining the problem. Anything you need to
know, I'll do my best to answer. Ask away!

 

First, you need to be sure your sound driver is OK. Start, search input,
type:
devmgmt.msc

Look at your sound devices, Use the action menu to 'uninstall' all of them,
and then action menu, 'scan for hardware changes' to reinstall them all.
This will probably fix it.
If no help, you should try an SFC fix, shown here.
Some Windows Vista functions may not work, or Windows Vista may stop
responding: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833
--
Was this helpful? Then click the Ratings button. Voting helps the web
interface.
http://www.microsoft.com/wn3/locales/help/help_en-us.htm#RateAPostAsAnswer
Mark L. Ferguson
..

 

As I feared, no luck I'm afraid. I've gone a step further and installed the
latest driver from the Realtek website (after first removing the old one)
and it's made no difference.

This came back with "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity
violations."

This is a bit of a surprise, as I really expected to find something wrong,
even if it had no bearing on my problem.

 

Not sure how this works on the web interface - if I post again does it bump
it?

This problem is not going away and it's driving me scatty! I've found
nothing in the knowledgebase, although I rarely have much luck with search
engines.

It's not just Office 2000 file dialogs that are dinging, I've discovered. I
have an application on my flash drive called CruzerSync (synchronises
between my flash drive and PC) and that dings at me whenever I click on a
file or folder too!

It seems that anything that doesn't use standard Vista dialogs or interfaces
is in danger of dinging at me.

I'm getting closer and closer to reinstalling Windows (in-place upgrade on
top of the existing Vista installation) but if I can't find the cause I
think I'll be wasting my time as the problem will just come back again. I'm
also scared I'll have to go through all the heartache of getting my older
apps to work properly again, just as I did when I first installed Vista.

 

I have the same issue. I have a Dell XPS One. What is your hardware? O
my other Vista boxes I have never had this issue. It is really drivin
me crazy

 

Core 2 Duo 6700, Foxconn 965X7AA motherboard, 2GB RAM, two Samsung 300GB
hard drives, only one currently in use, GeForce 8800GTS graphics card,

I'm assuming Dell have been unable to help you?

 

Bingo!

Thank you so much. You don't know how much that's been driving m
round the bend.

What's more, now I know which entry to amend if I do decide to assign
sound of my choice