Computer help forum: WAV files won't play

RIGHT click on Start, choose "Explore" from the little menu. When the Explorer window loads, click on "Tools" in the upper left, choose "Folder Options", then click on the "File Types" tab. When that loads, scroll down to the WAV-Wave Sound file extension and click on it once to highlight it. In the lower part of the window, you should see the program that is supposed to open it.. If it isn't currently "Windows Media Player", then click on the "Change" button. When the next window opens, place a CHECK mark in the box that says: "Always use this program to open this file type", then select "Windows Media Player" from the list of programs. When you're done, click on "OK", Apply, OK, etc.

Now navigate to the C\Windows\Media folder and attempt to play the actual .wav files there. Each of the .wav files should have an icon associated with WMP.

Hope this helps.

Grif

This worked perfectly and easily. Our help desk had no clue. I'm learning to search the web rather than calling them.

Yes, my speakers are powered on and plugged in. Like I said, computer seems to be able to play other sound file types just not wav.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!
Tried several of the fixes on this site including audiosvr.reg, dingfix.reg, netvol.reg, restoresounds.reg and valuenotset.reg. When one didn't resotre my sounds, I tried another. Don't remember the order I tried them.

STRANGE things happened. In the middle of that night after I tried all these fixes, my computer woke me up with all these sounds I had attempted to play to test whether it could play wav files (some of the windows system wav files: ding, asterisk, shutting down sounds, etc...). I immediately tried to play them from the system sound manager and got nothing... again.

I restarted my computer, and it went NUTS! It takes muuuuuuuuuuch longer to boot now and plays no sounds at all of any file type. Windows that I have minimized no longer appear at the bottom of my computer on the same bar as the start menu (don't remember what that's called). My Norton antivirus won't start up anymore. I can't drag and drop files to my thumb drive nor cut/copy and paste files between folders. Also, I'm getting much more error messages when internet explorer tries to download a page: "A runtime error has occured. Do you wish to debug?"

Panicking!! Did I make a huge mistake? How can I fix this?

When you installed Winamp did it install any codec packs with it....I know that those codec packs sometimes mess up settings within the computer since they use the same resources as other programs.