I had an issue where there was no sound period. After much googling, i found this reponse from a girl in 2009! "My boyfriend figured it out for me. (sadly he figured it out AFTER I deleted all my sims and reinstalled.) It was the stupidest thing, I run vista and for some reason windows randomly decided that only the sims should have no sound and muted it every time I ran the game. So he opened volume control on my desktop, and unmuted it and when I re-entered the sims I had sound." I tired this, and it worked!! FYI.