just a quick update (also sending this reply update to another thread.)
had to replace a motherboard, normally i just swap the board and boot up. sometimes a few reboots are needed to get the detected hardware all working, but long story short, and ended up with no sound...otherwise the machine operated fine.
no error messages, it seemed to detect okay...just no sound.
did a reinstall of the game software...
sound works. could have been some error in the detection or a bad file or something.
so after a board swap, if things are acting funny... you may have to reinstall the game software to get everything good again.