Solved a set of strange problem with my PC

I came back home from work last night and found the following ultra strange problem:

- Internet Explorer (6) stopped working properly. No matter what URL I entered (including Windows Update), it always brought up FireFox and loaded the URL there. And after I uninstalled FireFox (by deleting the Portable Firefox), the IE simply return a dialog box "Application not present".

- No sound found the system, even though everything indicates OK. No broken DLL, no broken hardware driver. Everything looks normal, but there was just NO SOUND coming out of the sound card. Even after I connected the Firewire Solo to my system, the Firewire Solo didn't play any sound at all.

- The wireless mouse got every irresponsive on double click. It worked only once in a while.

Well, all of the problem are now resolved, but all in some very strange way:

- I solved the IE problem by ... guess what, STARTING the IE 7 beta 2 Portable version! In fact, I just remembered that a day ago I accidentally started IE 7 beta 2 portable and I tried to stop it's execution in the middle. Maybe that messed by the IE registry setting or such. So, this one really is myself to blame.

- For the sound problem, I resolved it like this: I thought of an idea that maybe the sound driver is working, but something screwed up my system. So what I start VMWare with WinXP. Will to VMWare in WinXP got sound? So I started VMWare with WinXP and bam, I got sound! But amazingly, so it the hosting system a.k.a my desktop. Yep, so that's how the problem was solved. Still don't know exactly how that could happen.

- For the mouse problem, I simply throw away the thick paper which I used as a poorman's mousepad. And now my mouse runs pretty smooth.

All these problems anonyed me for a night, but so glad that they got all resovled.