Sound chipset disappears on laptop

So this is my sad story.

I have a laptop with windows XP home, i tried to run featherlinux off a CD to try and get a feelfor the linux GUI and such. I played around, enjoied it. went back to XP to finish my work and now i have no sound. no sound at all. The device manager says everything's ok, the chipset is working properly. If i run winamp, it just hangs. anything just doesnt play the sounds.

I've tried:
-Uninstalling and reinstalling hardware.
-Reinstalling drivers.
-simple volume issues.
-reformatting the entire drive.

Nothing works.

The only suggestion ive gotten that i havent tried was change the bios to allow sound but theres no option in my bios for that.

Please, i'm at wits end here, ive lost all my programs from formatting and im spending all day re-installing them all again.