Audio Service Not Running - No Speakers Detected

I'm working on a custom pc that my brother built for me. The specs are in my signature. I recently upgraded from 32 bit to 64 bit Windows 7 home premium. I did a drive reformat also. Initially, everything was fine. But for some reason all of a sudden, I have no sound, my plugged in speakers are not detected at all and the audio service is not running. Everything else is fine. I assumed it was as a result of an update, so I did a system restore. I guess my restore points didn't go back far enough. No change.

According to my motherboard specs, I have the realtek ALC888 onboard audio. So, I thought I'd just be able to install the latest hd audio driver for my os from realtek's site. I tried several times (10+). It prompts me to restart and when I do, it says that the device driver did not install correctly and it defaults to the microsoft one every time. In device manager, I have a yellow triangle next to one of the 2 "high definition audio controllers" with a code 10 error (device cannot start).

Under sound, video and game controllers, I have "High definition audio device": microsoft, driver version 6.1.7601.17514 11/19/2010. I tried manually installing the driver from the zip file by directing the update utility to it's extracted location. It always says that my driver is up to date. I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be updating one of the hd audio controllers or the hd audio device or both (I've tried both), so I suppose i could be doing it wrong.

I've tried uninstalling the hd audio controllers and the hd audio devices and rebooting, the same thing happens. I've tried a repair install from the disc. No change. The only thing I haven't tried is reformatting my hard drive and doing yet another clean install. I really don't want to have to do this again because re-downloading my programs and music/docs/pictures is a chore. Completely reinstalled windows and still don't have any sound...I'm completely at a loss.