Lucky You. You haven't killed anything!
You don't say whether a save was involved prior to all this. If it was, maybe the following may throw some light on the subject:-
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...6&postcount=37
If this isn't the reason then your PC may just be suffering from the strain from running WAC3 ( assuming you meant this rather than WAW...apologies if you didn't!). This is a very demanding version graphically and memorywise. I don't have the worst system in the world but WAC slows it down to a crawl. Moreso than any other version I've played.
It seems that that a reboot before trying to run WAC does sometimes make things a little smoother. NB this view is very subjective.....don't have any FPS data to support it.
You also mentioned sound, and I'm wondering if your card acceleration is a little too high. Maybe bring it down a notch or two in the Control Panel???