Supreme Commander Forged Alliance sound stops working

Today I had a weird problem where my sound in Forged Alliance would stop working. Here’s the symptoms:

• Some UI sounds would work like menu buttons
• When the game starts, sound plays normally for a few seconds and then stops
• When launching SupremeCommander.exe directly, the intro movie doesn’t play and is a black screen.

I did some googling and found people suggesting to delete various preferences files etc but that didn’t work for me. I noticed my Windows 10 machine had an ‘up time’ of 30 days – you can see this in the task manager under ‘Performance’ tab.

This is odd because I shut down my PC every day. I looked into it and there’s something in Windows 10 called ‘fast startup’ which effectively is like hibernation. I performed a proper restart rather than a shutdown and the audio problem was fixed!

Hope this helps someone else out there with Forged Alliance Forever 🙂