Well Fred, I finally figured it out. My uncle's cat chewed through my center speaker, and subwoofer cable.
It just so happenned that I was uploading drivers after plowing snow, and everything went fine on the installs, so I was a little dismayed as to why it all of a sudden stopped working. I tried thinking it was the HD Audio drivers that nvidia install was doing, but obviously not. So I found a new set of adio drivers for the RealTek setup, and loaded them up, and when I went to test the speakers in the 5.1 surround sound, I had no center speaker, and no subwoofer. So first thing I do, is check the back of the rig where the cables plug in, and sure enough, the damn wire to those speakers is chewed through!
My uncle was decent though. He went and replaced the cable the cable for me, but I could toss the cat to the coyotes when they come around. Man, 2 days of fiddlin' around between shovelling and plowing snow. That sucks........
Anyways, I have a clean new shiney install of SH4. Oh, one thing was odd, when I went to use the radio station manager, the JB, I think the numbers are 121144, but the last 3 are .526 file, for some reason won't unpack from the compressed rar file.
The radio station manager says it's missing, which it is, so I have to dig it out and manually install it in the proper folder, and all is fine. There are 1 or 2 more files that do that for some odd reason. Even though they are there, they don't get unpacked.
But I run into the same thing with Captain Midnights CBS radio too. AFR loads in just fine though, along with radio Saigon.
Anyways, you can add chewed wires to the list, or at least make sure your cables are plugged in all the way. Especially if there are small pets afoot!