The silence of the sound card

The nightmare:
I want to listen to music while I browse, but IE won't let me. Help!

I'm listening to my collection of Marilyn Manson MP3s while surfing the Web, when suddenly the sounds cuts out. While that makes my neighbors happy, it's really bumming me out. Can you help bring the music back into my life?

Analysis:
Unfortunately, this problem has about a bazillion different causes, some due to IE and others due to Windows or buggy audio drivers. Bear with us; these explanations will take a while.

Advice:
Latest but not least
First and foremost, you must make sure you're running the latest audio drivers for your hardware. Although it's unlikely that drivers would cause IE-specific problems, outdated or faulty audio drivers can result in myriad sound problems. If you know your sound card's manufacturer, visit the manufacturer's Web site to find recent driver downloads. If this doesn't work, you can also try using Windows Update to find the driver you need: from the Start menu, select Windows Update. This will open up a browser window and load the Windows Update page. Select the Product Updates link and, when the update page finishes loading, scroll to the bottom of the page. If the Windows Update site has any available driver updates, they'll be listed in the Device Drivers section. Download and install any listed drivers. If your drivers are all up-to-date, you can assume that the problem most likely lies with IE itself.

Bad Media Bar
Another possibility is the way you've configured the IE Media Bar. This built-in multimedia player pops open on the left-hand side of IE and allows you to listen to or watch Web media while continuing to surf other pages in the main browser window. Go to Tools > Internet Options, click the Advanced tab in the dialog box that opens, then scroll down the list to the Multimedia section. Find "Don't display online media content in the media bar" and make sure it's not checked.

If this option is checked and you're using Windows Media Player (WMP) as your CD or MP3 player, you're in a bit of a pickle if you want to keep it that way. Once you click a Web link to an audio file, WMP automatically stops playing its current sound source (your CD or MP3 file) in order to play the audio from the link. And, unfortunately, once the Web audio is done, WMP doesn't remember what it was doing before, so it doesn't resume playing your music. If you let IE play Web audio through the Media Bar, then you won't have this problem.

The OS did it
Unfortunately, although you may think your audio loss is due to IE, it may actually be caused by bugs in your Windows operating system. If you're having audio trouble (such as no sound at all or only intermittent audio) in Windows 2000, go to the service pack site and grab at least Service Pack 2. It fixes a number of audio-related problems, including some related to Dell, Gateway, and Compaq PCs.

There are also some Windows 98-specific audio bugs that seem to be linked to IE. The problems stem from the fact that IE relies on the Windows Media Player to provide playback for the Web, although WMP remains a separate product from IE. Sometimes, developers don't test the two apps together as well as they should, and these bugs creep in.

Our advice: First, download the latest Windows Media Player. If that fixes your audio problems, you're done.

If your audio issues continue and occur whenever you run the IE 6 Media Bar, you'll just have to avoid using the Media Bar. That's the only fix we could wring out of Microsoft for the moment. Is IE 6 safe for online shopping?