Lockups when playing speech wav files

Hello, good people. I’m trying to get I-war 2 to run properly, and I came upon this forum. While it doesn’t seem very active, I’m hoping someone can help me.

The problem:

After installing the game and the recentmost patch, everything was fine until the point when I got my first two turret fighters. Since then, the game frequently locks up, always when it tries to load a speech .wav file. It usually happens the first time a neutral transport warns me to stop shooting at it, but sometimes it happens sooner, when the t-fighters try to confirm some order; at yet other times, on other occasions.

What I’ve done so far:

Reading through these forums, I’ve seen similar complaints, with advice suggesting that it’s a codec problem that occurs when the program tries to play these files. I have confirmed this by renaming the streams/audio/speech folder which stores these wavs, and then the game ran fine (only without speech, obviously).

One thread mentioned that the game needs to codecs to run properly, Microsoft ADPCM for speech and Fraunhoffer for music.

Now, figuring that maybe my ADPCM codec is corrupted, I installed it again from the Win98SE install disk. If I go to Control Panel -> Multimedia and list the active audio codecs, it shows up there, it’s not turned off, and it has a priority of 1. At the same time, however, if I start Gspot and have it analyze one of the wav files in the speecj directory, then I get different, contradictory information:

As soon as I load the file, it says “Codec NOT installed” in the Stat line of the Audio window. If I click on the Aud 1 button in the bototm left corner, it says “Unable to render Audio”. However, if I click on the 1 and 2 buttons under MS A/V, then the wav file is played properly.

And, well, I’m stuck here. It seems to me the problem is with the ADPCM codec, and Gspot confirms this. However, this is right after I’ve reinstalled the codec, and the operating system itself reports it as functional! Please tell me, what should I do?

System specs:
Windows 98SE
Intel 82801DB(M) ICH4(-M) – AC’97 Audio Controller [A-1]

Other, probably irrelevant:
Intel Celeron 4 CPU
Abit BD7II(-RAID) motherboard
256 Mb RAM
GeForce4 MX videocard.