Device Manager Is Blank / Sound Has Disappeared

There are a few things that contributed to the leadup to me losing my Device Manager and sound. First, about 3 weeks ago, I bought 2 sticks of Mushkin EM3200 DDR RAM (two 1GB sticks; 2GB total). Installed it, and it disagreed with my board in a big way (apparently it was the voltages or timings). I managed to get as far as "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." before I got one of two error messages: "NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." or "Windows failed to load because the System32 folder is corrupt or missing." In each case, I popped in my Windows XP disc and fixed the boot record from the recovery console (I did not restore the MBR), and it booted right in.

At the time, Windows booted up just fine, but lately I've been having some funky problems. I've got one SATA drive (partitioned into two) which is my boot drive and one IDE drive that I just use for storage. Sometimes, with my IDE drive plugged in on boot, I can't get Windows to load by any means. Sometimes it boots just fine. When it boots fine, and I go into "My Computer" (either via the Start Menu or the icon on the desktop) it takes about 20-30 seconds to actually display anything (I get either the flashlight-over-folder animation or it just doesn't load). With my IDE drive unplugged, I get no such issues.

As well, the first couple of times I restored the boot record, I had no issues with sound at all. Then suddenly Windows started saying I had no sound device (my volume icon had disappeared, and the "Sounds and Audio Devices" menu in the Control Panel showed no output/playback device) although I clearly do have one. The weird thing is, I still got sound. Then I updated my sound card drivers (it's onboard sound; Realtek AC'97, pretty standard fare) and lost sound completely. All I get now is motherboard/PC speaker beeps. So I attempted to check the Device Manager to see if maybe there was just a device conflict. I say attempted because my Device Manager was completely blank. And I mean completely. All it showed was the title bar, menu buttons, and a white page. Nothing else. Zip.Just ran out to work and got an Audigy for $30 thinking it may just have been my onboard sound kicking the bucket. Installed it, booted up and tried to install the drivers. The driver installation program detected no Audigy in my machine (and I thought it wouldn't because Windows didn't pop up with the little "Found New Hardware Wizard" when I booted).