SOLVED my sound card had died
I dug out a usb sound card and everything works fine ill never understand why the time bar in media stopped moving lol.
all of a suddon i have no sound
and looking at this forum and others it seems to be a recent trend with acer (emachines)
vista x64
emachines e525
tryed stock driver and latest realtek
reinstalled windows and no joy
device manager is happy
playback devices says "working properly" with a tick
when i click test and put my ear to the speaker i can hear it crackle ever so slightly
heres the weird thing
trying to play an mp3 in windows media
the visulisation starts up as if its playing
but the bar / timer dosnt move and no sound ofc
flash vids like youtube wont play.... the bar dosnt move
microsoft fix it says no problems found
it cant be a dodjy update coz i did a clean install of vista with network disabled
it cant be a driver coz the stock driver has allways worked b4
and i cant se it being hardware.... iv not dropped it or anything
and if that was the case it shouldnt affect the time/play bar thing
soooo any ideas? other than pee on it and buy another