"Unable to initialize sound services"

The game brings this popup up when you copy/move the folder from its original installation to some other place, and it disables sound.

• It is NOT registry related, it is all about the folder, as long as I keep the game in its original folder, I can play from sound even in a shared folder in a LAN on from a Linux OS using WINE, in which the installer was never run.
• Google will only give results in which reinstalling wc3 is the only suggestion/fix found. This is not possible for me, I do have a CD and CDkey, etc. But this computer does not have a CD drive... I don't have ways to share CD drives, installation would be tiresome anyway...

The computer is an ASUS eee from last year, surprisingly, you can run wc3 in opengl mode at a speed that makes it at least good for testing triggers, so this would increase my chances to do wc3 stuff... ok, it already does, but sound is a good thing to have sometimes when testing maps.

In linux I had this issue because KDE forces the ARTS server. The solution was set in wine the 'dmix' sound controller, and voila!!!

I hope it helps.

It doesn't...

This sound services BS happens even on windows. It is not about sound support it is something to do about the folder.

http://www.securegamers.com/shadowfr...keygrabber.php + http://blizzard.com/account/ ?

I highly doubt it is copy protection, if it was, it would just prevent the game from running, there are also reports of this getting fixed automatically for some until some time.

Sometimes when I hibernate my laptop (windows XP) the sound doesn't work when I unhibernate. Somtimes I even need to not just shutdown-restart, but actually remove the battery for it to start working again.

When that happens, I get the error you describe when starting wc3.

Could be due to a file no longer being read only or something? WC3 runs fine without registry (I know since my old WC3 install worked fine after a clean XP install - I didn't move the folder though).

Tried removing all registry entries for WC3?

that wouldn't be necessary, there are no registry entries yet.

Yes. it is probably some non-sense like that.

Can you download the installer from the Blizzard Store website and run that with WINE? That doesn't require a CD drive.

Mine works even if I move it to another folder, as long as it's the same PC, when I tried copying the warcraft 3 folder to a laptop, it still works but the sound was missing, it said something about strom.dll missing, maybe that's also the problem with yours? I also thought that it was a registry key that caused that but when I tried having a backup of an installed warcraft 3 on my backup drive, It worked, without even installing it, the only issue was I couldn't patch it since the patch requires a registry key(s).

EDIT: Oh it wasn't the storm.dll, I got confused, It was also the sound init error.

imo some os sound issue. (for example after on win xp svchost service get reloaded wc3 have this issue)

The message could be generated by sound issues, but it also appears when you change the folder, and this is the case... I just want to know why does this happen, it is very odd.

maybe a configuration file is inside the warcraft mpq? The only thing I know that can mess up settings are configuration files, but I tried searching for hidden files inside the warcraft III folder and I found nothing, so maybe it's in the mpq? I really don't know since I haven't tried messing the mpq.

I also did encounter this problem as I stated in my previous post, but it's different form vexorian's encountered error, mine was moving the game from a pc to another pc, the only solution that worked was also reinstalling the game.

I made a copy of my folder to a new location before updating to 1.22 (so I can use JAPI natives). I havn't had any problems with either folder.

I did try and copy the wc3 folder to a flash drive so I could mod on the go. World Editor and New Gen World Editor both worked fine on my test computer (no wc3 install) but war3 would error. I'm not sure if its the same error, but I thought it might be relevant.

ahhh w8 i remember (in some way)
*war3folder\redist\miles\
is important it bears the sound systems. maybe it have some relation to this one.