Sonar 7/Vista - audio drivers and sync problems

I’ve just bought a new PC, running Vista Ultimate, and have loaded a fresh out of the box copy of Sonar 7 Studio, and the 7.1 patch. Am now suffering 2 problems, which may be related, so I’ll cover them both here – sorry if these topics have been covered before, newbie to this forum.

Problem 1 - Audio drivers – when firing up Sonar I get a message saying “no audio input devices available, go to options/audio and select one” – I’ve read the hardware setup guide and have set the Playback and Recording Driver Mode to MME – but going to the Drivers tab, there are no input audio devices to select – output, yes, but no input. I’ve reloaded the Realtek drivers, and have uninstalled/reinstalled Sonar, plus the patch, but the results the same, no audio drivers. All other programs requring audio work fine – previously recorded Pro Audio 9 projects playback OK (apart from the problem below) - I can even audio record files using Creative Wavestudio, but not Sonar.
Checking the AUD.INI file it has entries pointing AliasOutput and AliasInput to the Realtek drivers (although half the file seems to be missing tonight, for some reason) – and going to Options/Initialisation File brings up the editor dialog box, but no entries are shown – is this correct – makes me think that Sonar’s not picking up the AUD.INI file for some reason – which currently lives in the AppData/Roaming/Cakewalk/SONAR 7 Studio Edition – is that the right location ?, I used all the default settings when Sonar installed so I’d expect it to be in the right place.

Problem 2 - Audio/Midi sync – when loading previously recorded projects (Cakewalk Pro Audio 9) the midi tracks are sync-ed, the aduio tracks are sync-ed, but the mid and audio tracks, played together, are out of sync. May well be related to the above audio drivers problem.

Suspect I might have to buy a dedicated audio card, but surely someone can confirm whether this is just a config/install problem or realted to the integrated motherboard/audio on my PC.

Any ideas – this is really beginning to piss me off, so all constructive suggestions (excluding go back to XP) will be welcomed. No wailing on guitar makes Kimbo very depressed.