Volume Control icon gone from system tray,win98,now have no sound.

I lost the volume control icon on Win 98. and have no sound. The whole
audio page in control panel/multimedia is not active.
I ran the DirectX Diagnostic Tool, but it freezes half way through
collecting information for sound.Seems to be as puzzled as I am! I ran
it to try to find out if I have a sound card installed still,as a
novice I don't know how else to find out if the plug and play device
listed in device manager is a sound card or what.
Don't know if it has anything to do with the problem, but in device
manager, under system devices, processor support has the yellow
exclamation mark next to it. It reads" The NTKERN.VXD device loader(s)
for this device could not load the device driver. (code2)"
Microsoft have a solution for the processor support problem, but it's
not for Win98.
Any help would be appreciated
Thank you