OK. I screwed up something. Not on mine, but my friend's. He was having the same problems so I got on and pulled up the forum to go through the same steps. Only when I tried to run Add Hardware and search for devices, it found the sound card. I deleted the driver in remove programs and reinstalled it using Add Hardware. When it prompted me for a restart I did. Upon rebooting a disk check came up and froze on step 3 of 3 after the percentages had finished. I waited about 10 minutes before pressing the button on the tower to try again. When it came back up again I let the disk check try to run three more times, but if kept locking in the same place. The next time I skipped it and thought it booted as normal, but about 1 min after the desktop appeared everything froze. I've gone through that several times now. Every time I have about 1 min where it seems to work fine and then it freezes. I didn't download anything. All I did was delete the old driver ( I think it was RealTek), go to Add Hardware, told it to install, restarted, and then the problems started.
I feel really bad about messing up his computer and I have no idea how or why it's freezing like it is.
I'm sorry to revive this, but please help me.