Audio problem and Troubleshooter problem

When it rains, it pours.

Seemingly out of the blue, my computer can no longer play audio. This
includes sound from audio and audio/video files of all types, either from
the internet or from hard drive, and also audio CDs.

In an effort to try and pinpoint the problem, I typed in "troubleshooter" in
98SE Help and got a variety of troubleshooters for various problems. But
none of them work - when you select a radio button and click Next, you get a
blank page, or, rarely, an error message. In the case of one of the modem
troubleshooters the error message reads:

Line 23
Char 1
Error Object doesn't support this property or method
'parent.t1.ApgtsX21.Run Query'
Code 0
URL:
Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?

(The "no sound" audio troubleshooter yielded a blank page)

I suppose the logical order for problem solving here would be to get the
troubleshooter working again and then see if it comes up with anything for
the lack of audio, but at this point any advice on any of the above is most
welcome.

Note: After some trepidation, because the accompanying warnings concerning
the impairment of Help files in certain situations was not clear, I
installed the most recent critical update. Don't know if that has anything
to do with this, but I thought it was worth mentioning just in case.