I'm technically challenged

My main volume control in WInXP won't let me set it anything higher than completely low. It's not muted it's just that when I set it high it drifts back down to the bottom. I've installed a new driver and checked the properties but to no avail. Any idea why it's doing this? Thanks!

Dog

Do you have a keyboard with a volume control? maybe the volume down key is stuck? (tap it a few times).

No, actually it's my laptop and there is no hardware volume control. Very perplexing. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Check the equalizer (for whatever it is you play whatever in). If it's system-wide, contact support for whoever you purchased whatever components or machine from.

actually laptops DO have hardware volume control (kind of), using a key combination, eg Fn-F10, where Fn is the "Function" key for the blue key labels.
Probably there is a program running in thebackground that is forceing a certain volume? As usual I reccomend to use a good task manager to see what task and processes are running, and if one of them is likely to mess with the volume. I'd suggest to get Sysinternals ProcessExplorer, for free from M$.

It's also possible that somehow an application (or your volume control) is responding to the "Global Hotkeys", these are the hotkey equivalents of the fancy media keyboard shortcuts (i.e. CTRL+ALT+UP and CTRL+ALT+DOWN for volume up and down respectively).

doggie: open the volume control panel and check if the wave slider is set to low. thats in most cases the reason that even highest volume results in low volume output.

I had this problem a few years ago. Volume would occasionally get set to zero for no apparent reason.

It eventually disappeared. Perhaps a Windows update, or updating/uninstalling some application? I never did figure it out.

that sounds very Politically Correct. :P

Have you got any apps / IM's running that use speech or have sound controls built in? Some of them have an incredibly annoying auto volume adjust thing that can do this. Try closing any clients/apps one at a time and see if its the same. If you find the culprit look in its options, theres usually a tickbox somewhere.

Well, Itunes autoupdated itself and it's quit doing it.
Who knows why it did it in the first place but it fixed itself. Thanks for all your help!