Well, I made a Knoppix CD, and booted from it, and it failed to autodetect the motherboard's onboard sound at all. So I don't know any other reasonable way to determine whether it's an OS issue, unless there's some reason to expect that some other distribution would do better than Knoppix? Or maybe I should make a bootable DVD?
I'm still mostly convinced that it's a hardware dysfunction, and at this point I am less concerned with expense and more with how quickly I can get this resolved. So if replacing the motherboard is significantly more complicated than just shoving a sound card in there, as I suspect it would be (wouldn't I be pulling a CPU off of one board and nailing it to the new one? That sounds like the sort of thing I shouldn't be doing), I am inclined toward a sound card regardless of whether it's a terribly cost effective solution.
As far as old sound cards go, I have no idea how nicely Vista plays with random N-year-old sound cards. (As you may have surmised by now, I don't really know much of anything.)
Re: disclaimer: course 18
I'm still mostly convinced that it's a hardware dysfunction, and at this point I am less concerned with expense and more with how quickly I can get this resolved. So if replacing the motherboard is significantly more complicated than just shoving a sound card in there, as I suspect it would be (wouldn't I be pulling a CPU off of one board and nailing it to the new one? That sounds like the sort of thing I shouldn't be doing), I am inclined toward a sound card regardless of whether it's a terribly cost effective solution.
As far as old sound cards go, I have no idea how nicely Vista plays with random N-year-old sound cards. (As you may have surmised by now, I don't really know much of anything.)