Vista Home Prem 32 bit - Audio - no sound - error on avrt.dll

[Hoib]

I notice there's quite a few questions with no response but let's give this a shot. Dell LT Inspiron 1525 - Vista Home Prem 32 - purchased 2008. Several months ago, started giving this error on boot or attempting to play audio:

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/f...dll/Vista3.png

I'm unable to fix this by simply replacing driversets. Been there, done that at the Dell website. I am still not confident that I've completely successfully updated the correct driverset - there are two objects in Dev Mgr > Sound. One is the Sigmatel HD Audio Codec and the other is the Intel HD Audio Controller. I've attempted updating both of these at least three times.

I'm unable to uninstall and reinstall WMP because the version that's sitting on the system isn't viewable to uninstall: See this screenshot showing Vista's (and thus my) inability to uninstall what's there:

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/f...dll/Vista9.png

avrt.dll has the same hash in the Windows folder as it does in the cache. Same date, same filesize. I don't know how to "pull" the .dll off Dell's Reinstallation DVD to see if it's different. MCCSS (the service which Windows Audio Service is dependent) isn't able to start. Gives an error "0x1c". All this makes me think the problem's rooted deeper in Vista than it is in some hardware driver somewhere.

Can I get some help here on how to fix this rather than reformatting and restarting Vista?

Thanks.

H