audio device not recognized after update

[rmkroc]

Greetings!

Kinda frustrated with a Pavilion dv6915nr.  A friend of mine gave me this PC to see if I could make it work for someone after he bouaght a new one. It seems to be a good machine but I can't keep the sound functional.  System delivered with Vista Home Premium and had been working fine until about 4 months ago.  The sound system is Conexant HD Samrt Audio 221. One day the speaker with a red X (no audio installled) appeared in the system tray and I have been fighting this issue ever since. 

Long story short is I know the hardware works.  I did a full recovery and the sound worked fine until Windows update completed its third round of recommended updates.  Did this twice.  Tried to downgrade to XP but that was a nightmare. Decided to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional.  Everything was going well until suddenly after an update, the sound stopped coming out of the speakers.  The system insicated that sound was being generated and there were no hardware conflicts but no sound from speakrers or headphione jack.  The sytem was using the Microsoft HD audio driver at the time.  i then tried to update the dirver and it found the Conexant driver and installed it.  now I have the pseaker with the red X again!

I am trying to get this to be basic functional system for a family less fortunate than most so they can do baisic internet searchs, watch video, and Sykpe with their extendied family.  While I suppose I could do the recovery install one more time and turn off automatic updates I feel there should be a way to solve this problem. I found lots of stuff on the net but none fixes this issue.

Can anybody out there help?

Thanks!

Mike