Sound gone after Reboot - Latitude CPt S500GT + ESS Maestro 3i

Hello,

i've now installed Win 98 SE on this older Laptop the second time, and everything works fine at first. But soon after some reboots, the sounddriver seems to be defect so there is no sound at all anymore, without any error-message. When checking Sound in the Control panel, everythings is "greyed" but Devicemanager still shows the Sounddevice. After reinstalling it works again for some reboots and then it just happens again ?

I installed the drivers of file: M39ua05m.exe directly from Dell. Directx version is 9.0c and seems ok, same issue before with version 8.1. BIOS is version A16.

I'm quite experienced and tried a lot to find the bug but i'm running out of ideas now. :(

Any help is appreciated,

thanks in advance,

cheers, Steffen