BOTH ISSUES SOLVED!!!!!
Western Digital 500HDD- Bad Sectors and on it's way OUT after two years,so I sent in an RMA and will be getting a replacement HDD. The Raptor 74GB booted right up into Windows w/o the 500GB,but with the 500GB plugged in, all kinds of issues!

AUDIO-MSI P35 Platinum / WinXP PRO 32 SP2/ Intel Quad 6600 Core2/ PC6400- 3.3GBDDR / NVidia GeForce 8600GT PCI-E /REALTEK HD AUDIO onboard sound.

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If anyone has suffered what I have in the last week or so of not having any sound after a WinXP reformat, try this, it worked for me.

Start Windows XP in safe mode (slam F8 a bunch while the computer is starting up, until you see a menu)
Open Hardware Manager, and find this: "Microsoft UAA bus driver"

Delete it, and any other audio devices, including the one you're trying to install (Not the codecs) and restart, back into another safe mode. Run the setup.exe again, and tell me what happens.

Edit: If the "Microsoft UAA Bus Driver" doesn't want to uninstall, right click it, and disable it, restart into another safe mode, and then try to delete it.
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Here is the setup.exe file (WDM_R240.exe) (v.2.89) (79.9mb) WinXP 32/64 (there are other O.S.’s there)

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/
Go to Realtek - DOWNLOADS> COMPUTER PERIPHERAL ICs> High Definition Audio Codecs (Software)

They also have the AC’97 Codecs (software too, but I never used that for this fix)

I would LOVE to thank all of you who chimed in to help me resolve this issue..Much appreciated!