Two weeks ago I installed Comodo Firewall on my wife’s desktop computer. It worked so well, that when my McAfee license expired last week I installed it on my laptop.
After installation I lost the sound on my laptop. In fact, it looks like Comodo’s installation took out my sound drivers, as the sound card was no longer recognized on my laptop. I went into Control Panel | Sounds and it looked to Windows XP as if I didn’t have any sound device.
I did a system restore and tried again. Same thing. Before Comodo, I have sound. After Comodo, no sound. I restored back to the pre-install, so it’s not currently on my laptop.
Has anyone reported anything about this? The computer is a Dell Inspiron E1405. I’ve had no problems with the sound in the past.
I can’t imagine what happen, I have a Dell E1505 and CFP didn’t affect my sound. Looking through D+ I can’t even find SigmaTel. Looking at SigmaTel in my control panel and all it says on double click is allow pop ups.
I suggest you go to the Dell download and drivers and re-install.
Edit: Found SigmaTel in D+ listed as C:\program files\ sigmatel. Custom Policy Access Rights- All ask.
No problem Here,
a Dell Latitude D8xx with sigmatel installed.
My sound is working fine right now, without Comodo, and my SigmaTel drivers are in place, so I don’t need to re-install right now.
I suppose I could install Comodo and then re-install the drivers. Unfortunately, this process has left me a little gun shy as far as Comodo is concerned. I’m worried about what else might have been deleted in the install process.
As I said, my wife (who doesn’t have a SigmaTel sound card) has no problems with Comodo. I’d like to run with the same firewall on both computers but that’s looking quite iffy right now.
agoodall,
Installing cfp could not delete your drivers or other software.
In what modes are where your firewall and defence+ ?
Have you by any chance pressed “Block” on a request for stacsv.exe (the sigmatel sound service). ?
It didn’t make sense to me that Comodo could have taken out the sound drivers. So it got me wondering if maybe something else was at work.
At any rate, I created a new Windows XP restore point and reinstalled Comodo. Whatever happened last time, it looks to be fine this time. Very weird. I know that I uninstalled McAfee and restarted before installing Comodo, but maybe something was taken down by Mcafee’s removal?
Regardless, Comodo is running and so is my sound card. I’ll report if I have any problems, but it looks like this was some sort of weird installation or removal/installation hiccup.
Thanks, guys! Your insistence that Comodo was working fine gave me the confidence to try re-installing.
Allan
Hi Allan,
Great to hear it all went well this time.
As always with software installs/uninstalls just do 1 at a time, that way you know where to look when something goes wrong somehow (and computers have a habbit of doing so sometimes 
It’s a bit more pain to boot a few times but when you run in to trouble could also save you time troubleshooting.
If there are questions about CFP then you know where to go (:WIN)
Did you uninstall McAfee before installing CFP? Perhaps that program did something.
Edit: Saw where you also think it may have been McAfee.
When I said everything was okay, I spoke too soon.
I shut down my laptop for an hour. I restarted it, and now my sound is gone. Again.
I started up my computer this morning and read the e-mails about Comodo. I re-installed Comodo and restarted. After Comodo was installed, I surfed the web, checking e-mail and a forum that I am on pretty often. That’s it. I shut down the laptop, started it up again and now no sound.
In fact, it’s not just SigmaTel audio that’s lost. I’ve lost all sound devices, including my bluetooth headset (I realize, now, that was the case last time, too).
So, everything was fine, I installed Comodo, and now I’ve lost my sound. There is nothing else that I did with my computer that could have caused this. I’m 100% certain that Comodo did something.
Let’s see,
Try setting the firewall and D+ to disabled and reboot see if that “helps”.
Is there any other security software active ? There are some known problems with CFP and CMF running together and having some program’s go eager on cpu, can you check to see if there is a process with high cpu load ?
Did you check the windows event viewer to see if something is logged over there ?
I’d try looking in D+ Computer Security Policy look for SigmaTel and click on it, click edit. It should be set to custom (at least mine is) Click “access rights”, all should say ask, click “protection settings” all should say no.
CFP HAS some sound driver issues.
Weird thing is, i got a brand new Sony Vaio BZ Notebook and downgraded to XP, Realtek HD Audio. Everything was fine until i installed CFP. Then, after the restart i realised an error watching flash video. The video stopped after 2sec and I had no sound. No sound at all. So the first thing was checking if it is just CFP related and deinstalled. Sound was ok again.
Before installing again i wanted to search for solution but just found this thread and replied
Going through old e-mails, I realized I hadn’t replied to this.
There were no other security programs running at the time, except for an anti-virus program.
After the last time this happened (fortunately I was smarter the last time I installed Comodo and created a system restore point immediately before installing), I restored Windows and my sound was back. I know for a fact the only thing that changed between having sound and losing it was installing Comodo.
I restored Windows and installed a competitor’s product. I haven’t had a problem since.
Too bad you didn’t take steps to correct the problem with CFP and Sigmatel. It was probably simple, finding it, not so. Anyway, glad you’re back in business.
It wasn’t just SigmaTel. All my sound devices were trashed. My SigmaTel Audio was gone, as was my Plantronics bluetooth headset.
Installing a firewall shouldn’t trash your audio devices. And note that they were only lost after a second reboot after installation. I installed Comodo and rebooted, and had my sound. I rebooted after that, and no sound. So whatever Comodo thought it was protecting me from, I was “unprotected” after Comodo was supposedly in place.
Perhaps it was something fairly easy to find, but I’d already lost a couple of hours trying to debug the issue and simply couldn’t spend any more time on something that might or might not have worked.
I hope this issue is fixed, as another message suggests I’m not the only one with the problem. So far Comodo is running just fine on my wife’s desktop, but the first sign of trouble it’s coming off. Its important to have faith in your security software. This incident shook my faith in Comodo, regardless of whether it was a freak occurrence on a particular set up of computer, or whether it was something more substantial.
Anyway, glad you're back in business.
Thank you.