Windows sound gone...everywhere?

The wife's rig and server, P4 3.2, Gf6800ultra, Asus P4c800edlx, and sound blaster audigy, suddenly lost sound. The sound blaster was still showing as a device in device manager, but when I tried to use any of Creative's utilities, I got an error saying device not found.
I pulled the audigy, uninstalled all drivers and software, and went in the bios and turned the onboard sound back on. Windows didn't recognize it as new hardware and it doesn't show in device manager. I reinstalled the audigy and windows saw the device, attempted to load drivers, and same result, hardware error. I took the audigy back out, unistalled again. Tried the onboard and no luck.
I question that the audigy is bad as the onboard sound wasn't recognized either, and as for as i recollect, the onboard sound worked fine when I installed the audigy. What could be causing windows to lose all sound? I checked all the normal tabs but cannot find the source of the conflict. I checked hardware conflicts etc. Very strange as it worked fine one day and just stopped.
I did try a system restore to roll back to when it did work and the restore failed. As far as I know, no new drivers software or anything was installed.
Any suggestions on how to get the sound back up?

Virus? Malware? Hard drive starting to have bad sectors? Bad shutdown/reboot and something got screwy in the registry? PSU going bad and bad voltages? Maybe the age of the components finally did something in?

If none of the above, something must have been done prior to the last reboot to have caused the problem. Could have been a install done in the background that neither of you were aware of (WindowsUpdate a culprit of course) that caused the problem.

Try digging further into the problem and eliminate more possibilities.

It's got Norton for virus and spy bot running. Everything else seems to function properly. Where do i start digging? I thought about updating the bios but that is always is risky.

Try disabling the onboard sound and removing the audigy. Uninstall all sound related drivers. Reboot. Run driver cleaner. Uninstall any media codecs you might have installed (klite, CCC, etc). If you have any windows updates that have been installed within a week of the problem occurring, uninstall those as well. Run a good registry cleaner, CCleaner or RegscrubXP. Reboot. Then try putting the card back in and installing the drivers. Another option, if that fails, might be to downgrade WMP and then reupgrade.