Well...I feel kinda sheepish...or did a while ago...when i fixed the problem with my sound card. Oddly enough this happened when I had given up and decided to try and install a new PCI sound card that i could plug into one of the PCI slots on the motherboard itself. Figuring it to be as simple as plugging it in and installing the driver I soon encoutered problems with that. Then I remember reading somewhere that I had to uninstall all the previous drivers before installing new ones. Thinking about this I thought to myself that I probably didn't do that. Sure enough I had installed the right driver over the wrong one (onboard driver). So I uninstalled everything and reinstalled the right one. Eureka. My speakers came to life.

The other issue I was a little peeved about was the processor speed. It wasn't really what it said on the tin but after talking to the provider I bought it from all I had to do was change a jumper switch on the motherboard itself and verify the BIOS settings. Now everything seems peachy for now. All the essential parts are there. Any other changes are just for convenience or increased quality but I'm happy for now.

Another note. On Saturday I decided to make the trip down to Kingston Computer Planet to see if i could pick up a generic sound card to bypass what i thought to be the problem. After telling one of the employees my problem, he said he didn't want to sell me a card because he didn't think it would solve the problem. This was because the motherboard had an extremely low percentage (<0.1%) of motherboards that had that problem; the problem, he said, was with the processes of the motherboard, maybe a BIOS setting.
This I found interesting. I don't remember any other time where I have gone in ready to buy something and an employee cared more about solving a problem than making a sale. Kudos to KCP.