Ok starting from the beginning.

1. RealTek Audio & Vista:

This has been bothering me for a while actually but I finally found a way to fix it. occasionally programs would lose sound. This persisted across restarts and updating drivers hadn’t helped. So what I noticed is that when programs stop working the sound mixer app would have a listing for “unnamed application” that was permanently stuck there. So the thing I’ve found that fixes it is to go to “control panel” then click on “sound” select your active output then click on “Properties” go to the “Advanced” tab then under the “default format” and select anything other than what you have now. click apply and then change it back and click apply again. For me this works 100% of the time. And has fixed issues with games such as crysis and COD5 where they lost there sound.

as for #2. The IRC Bot:

I’ve recently managed to get a test irc server setup on my local network so that I don’t have to make changes on a live system. And found that it doesn’t work right on this system (ubuntu 8.04 and inspircd) it appears that the welcome method isn’t triggered when it connects to the server. so it just sits there without joining any channels (among other things). I’m working to fix this and will post an updated version eventually.