The Audio service is not running but I have sound

[Doug_72]

I am facing a strange issue. There is a red x mark on my Sound icon in the system tray and it says - The audio service is not running - but I have sound!

What could be the issue?

[DeborahJ]

This could be temporary and usualy occurs during periods of heavy disk activity. The the speaker icon status in the notification area just has to be refreshed.

Reboot your computer and after the hard disk activity has reduced, the message will go away.