Fixing & Cleaning Windows Audio on XP

The windows audio implementation is known for its short cummings.
In particular the Sound,Video,& Game Controller Section has its surprises for the continuous audio users on windows.
This is in the registry under
HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

My system sported 83 entries under this section after a few years! I am not surprised that a lot of software fails with this after learning about the limited list of 10 devices for windows audio.

http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20090210.asp

After a recent failure of my audio setup I tried a new more severe approach. I identified multiple entries for some of my devices so I thought lets get rid of this and only install the existing ones.
(this is what people normally do with reinstalls, but hey I don't have time to reinstall my hundreds of working apps)
After backing up the list (!) I deleted it completely and restarted.... And see there... upon restart some new entries showed up corresponding to the existing devices!
I know took my .reg backup and identified the matching entries including the top level entry, copied them over to a new file and loaded them into the registry.

This restored the correct Device Manager entries. I could reapply the KB888111 realtek fix. Obviously the complete audio system was broken and I needed to reinstall the drivers, but that was exactly what I wanted!
In combination with the midifix from cakewalk it seems above a lot of problems can be solved like this.


Disclaimer: Don't try this if you don't know what you are doing. With the registry backup its should be fairly safe as you can simply restore the registry using the exported backup.... but