I don’t know about your sound problem… As chr0nicles said, that’s probably either something to do w/ OS, hardware, or drivers…
As for the gfx problem, one thing to consider is that some graphics cards and some specific graphics settings in your config file may not work together very well… So, what you could try doing is make backups of your config file, then download other people’s configs and try a few of them out and see if any fix the problem… Then from there figure out what’s different and fix yours. I dunno if that will work, but it’s a good option if all else fails.