When I start game, I notice Mr. Clay talking in text mode. The text goes by rather quickly while I am trying to figure out what is going on.

Should I be hearing his voice? From some of the posts I have read, it sounds like there is a voice DLL from Microsoft that reads his words.

Yes, I have speech for Clay and everybody else by default, using Vista 32.

This problem is normally caused by an incompatible sound codec from one of the codec packs you can download from the internet.

If you've installed one of those codecs you might have to uninstall it, or ensure that the official fraunhofer MP3 codec is higher priority.

Okay, I figured it out. I think that sometime ago, I had installed a codec pack (prob Klite or something like that) and uninstalled it since. Between that and who knows... my system no longer was configure to play WAV files.

I could play WAV files in the c:\windows\media folder, but the ones in the C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos\streams\audio\speech
would not play any sound.

When I tried to bring them up in Windows Media Player, I got a dialogue box complaining about needing a codec to play them, although they DID play in winamp.

After a bit of searching, I found this posting -- http://www.moviecodec.com/audio-codecs/need-codec-0x0022-37173/

The gist of it was that the codecs I was "missing" should be in the windows system32 folder, and have an .ACM extension. The should be refered to in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32

I checked this registry location, and sure enough, the entries did not match that of another XP machine that I was using to compare. Also, I found that I HAD the ACM files in my system32 folder.

After adding a few entries to my registry, I can now hear "Jefferson Clay" just fine.

Why did you uninstall K-Lite? Was it causing you an issue? I have K-Lite installed on Win7 64bit and no problems for me.