Weird problem, but not impossible. I had similar problem, when VMWare crash completely killed onboard sound on my old PC. Power-off, reboot and driver/VMWare (un)reinstall has no effect. Sound was broken even on live cd systems and the only way I found to to bring it back - wipe current OS and make a clean OS&driver install. Also, like a hyperfighter I repeat this error on another PC with same MB (sorry Ivan, the innocent victim of mine:)).
I think this cases has no connection between them, the point is that sometimes software crashes may lead to really strange and serious hardware failures.