Bizarre sound problem.

Ok, I was directed to this forum for help, and if you can indeed help me I'll name my firstborn after all of you (I'm probably lying about that).  Anyway, here goes.

I moved into my new Apartment a little over a month ago.  The first day I set up my PC (of course) and everything was fine.  Either the Second or third day, my sound stopped working.  I thought it might be the speakers at first, but I plugged them into my stereo and they worked fine. 

Here's where it gets confusing.  I was playing a really old, cheap computer game and suddenly I had sound.  All the music for this game is in MIDI format and my PC can play all of the sound files in MIDI but it won't play anything else.  I'm about ready to reinstall windows just to see if that *might* help, but any help I can get here would be much appreciated.

Open sndvol32.exe (Start+Run), then go Options+Properties, check all checboxes from the lower half, click OK to go back to the main window; then make sure none of the checkboxes are set to "Silence" and none of the volume bars are at minimum.