you need to get out the recovery disc that came with the computer and there are two parts of the disc , go to thr manual recovery , not the total recovry , and scroll down to the sound driver and slick on it then choose to reinstall. then scroll to bottom of the page and finish, this should bring it back to a functioning statr. i had the same thing happen to me and this did the trick. good luck.

I am not aware of any Windows 98 error messages that will say "your sound card is in use" or something similar, so I'm guessing that a specific program is complaining about it. If it's a specific program, contact the developer or publisher for help if you haven't already. When you refer to your "Startup group", I don't know if you're referring to Start > Programs > Startup or to the Startup tab in the msconfig utility. If you're not familiar with the latter, click Start, click Run, type msconfig in the box and click OK. Click the Startup tab and look at all of the entries there; many programs can run at startup but do not have an entry in the Start > Programs > Startup group. These entries are for those programs. If you haven't already, also hit Ctrl-Alt-Del while in Windows and look at the names of the programs in the white box. If there are a lot and you don't feel like finding out what each one does, close all of them except for Explorer and Systray. In Windows 98, those are the only two running background programs visible in the Task Manager that are needed. Note that the suggestion to get out your computer's recovery disc only applies if you have a pre-built system from a computer manufacturer; custom-built systems don't have a recovery disc but have an original copy of Windows instead.

You need to get a new computer. Windows 98 - sheesh!