Strange to say I had the opposite experience with my old iBuddie 4,
now gone to computer heaven. When I used Windows XP the sound was fine
for a couple of years then suddenly the built in sound card was no
longer detected. An external USB sound card fixed that problem, but
Windows never found the internal card again. After 5 years of that I
installed Ubuntu/Kubuntu and suddenly the internal sound card was back
and worked perfectly. That was the case up to the latest Kubuntu
version before I jettisoned the machine a month ago.