Sound card is dying

Yesterday I powered up my desktop PC, and wondered why all my music and sounds sounded like they were being transmitted through a tin can. I eventually switched speakers, thinking perhaps my trusty three speaker set up was dying. Still, the same tinny sounds from another set of speakers. Oddly enough, whenever I plugged in another set of speakers, I lost all sound altogether. Very weird.

I removed and reinstalled the audio controller drivers. No success.

So I decided to see about putting another card into my computer and see if I can get it going. After looking around for a half an hour, all I could find was an ISA card--and me with no ISA slots whatsoever.

At this point, I've just been tinkering with DSP effects in Winamp and seeing if I can at least coax a normal sound for music playback. So far, all tinkering has made currently playing songs okay, but whenever a song changes, the effects don't sound right for that one.

I wish I knew what caused this. Everything was working fine last Friday, and I powered my PC down, and only a couple of people have access to it, and I actually trust they haven't changed any settings on it.

What in the. . .

Passwords for chocolate? I know that this shouldn't surprise me, given the penchant for users to keep Post Its with login information posted on, of course, their monitors or keyboards.

.: sigh :.