Seeing his generous offer in the suggestions section

I used to do pc support and if this had been a customers i would have rebuilt it by now! But as its my own I would like to try to fix it first

Ok its a Dell Laptop Lattitude L400 , got XP Pro SP2 on it.
Problem is with the sound card in it.
Boot it up and sound works fine, no problem. Trouble is i rarely reboot it.....i just shut the lid on it....so it goes into standby mode (faster to get back on this way) . So reopen lid it springs back into life.....but the sound card has stopped working.....zilch...nowt....until i reboot it again.
Im pretty certain it was fine until a MS update many months ago......since then ive had the prob.
I went onto dells site today and downloaded the sound card driver for it. Uninstalled the driver, then ran the exe that id downloaded and it re-installed it again.....exactly the same......sound card fine on a reboot but if put it into standby.....sound card refuses to work when it comes back to life.
Device manager says theres nothing wrong with the sound card and is working

But there obviously is as if i got to sounds and try to play one of the system sounds....it never finishes it....eg the play button you click on changes to the stop symbol and stays like that.....it should play the sound and then change back to the play symbol again.
Any ideas m8? Its got me stumped
