Windows, hey? Who'd have it...!?

I long for the day when I'm in a job where I can abandon Windows as the Enterprise Operating System of choice, and switch to a more stable, more reliable and generally quicker Operating System. With more firms moving to the likes of Ubuntu and Mac OSX, and Cloud Services becoming more prevalent I can't see any reason why Windows needs to be the de facto standard for Enterprises any more.  This being said, I am unfortunately stuck with it.

The 'it' being Windows 7, which I'll admit is my second favourite Windows OS of all time (Windows 98SE sits at the number one spot), and has been a solid OS since it's release in 2009.  I found a very strange quirk in Windows 7 a few months ago after an update.  I'm afraid I don't know which of the updates was involved as they're all managed by my employers IT team.  This update somehow removed all of the default entries in the Windows Sounds dialog box.

This meant that all of the default Windows beeps, clangs and donks were gone. Not only that, but all of the Microsoft Outlook mail notification sounds and the Microsoft Lync ringtones as well.  This is quite an inconvenience when you need to explain to your boss why you haven't been answering the phone or any e-mails.

Being the tinkerer that I am, I checked the Windows Sound dialog from Control Panel and found an entirely empty list.

What the...?

The IT Team mentioned above were a tad stumped and could offer no real solution short of a rebuild of the laptop. As much as I understand the many benefits of a full rebuild: the speed increase for one, and the resulting tidiness of the desktop, I didn't much fancy the idea of going through the usual headache of backup and restore jobs and the inevitable items which get forgotten.  I thanked the team for their time, and decided to go it alone. Thanking my lucky stars that my employer trusts me with administrative rights on my machine.

After a few minutes of Googling, I managed to identify that the Sound Dialog draws its listing from a Registry Key, namely:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\.Default\

When navigating to this Key in my own registry, I could see that it was devoid of entries.

Rather than scouring the internet looking for a dodgy registry file to download, I decided to fire up VirtualBox, and using my Windows 7 DVD I installed a fresh OS onto a new Virtual PC.  Once this was up and running I configured a Shared Folder to enable me to share files between my PC and the new virtual machine.

Navigating the registry in my fresh Windows 7 OS, I exported the above registry key to the Shared Folder.  Back on my broken PC I found the exported registry file and imported it into my registry. A quick reboot later, and all my sounds were back, as good as new.

If you don't have the time, inclination or know-how to try this yourself, you can download the registry file I exported from Google Drive.