sound conflict

[dnalien]

A couple of months ago while I was using IE7, I wanted to listen to internet radio(I have DSL). at the time, I only had access to AOL radio from my IE toolbar. so in order to have been able to listen to AOL radio, I had to install an XML file. since then, I have been experiencing some sort of an audio conflict; sound will stop when I do anything, such as media players stop while a song plays or begins to play, videos on youtube stop playing, games that I D/L and play offline will stop. even clicking a link on any given site will cause my sound to stop. the sound cutting out is system wide; windows folders take longer to open, using windows search takes more than a few seconds to respond, and websites take longer to load. my sound returns only when I shut down or restart but will cut out again at any time. no one I know knows how to solve this problem, I have no way to contact my pc manufacturer, and microsoft has no answers.

[dnalien]

So apparently, no one here knows how to solve this problem either. I'll have to look elsewhere on the internet...