Songs play but NO SOUND..??

the last line was very important.  if audio will play but MIDI will not then you don't have it set up to send the MIDI tracks to the synth.  I assume "Creative Live Drive IR" is your soundcard?  is that like a Soundblaster?  have you been sending your MIDI tracks to your soundcard for an embedded synth (like soundblasters have)?

if so, then you just need to make sure that your MIDI track outputs are set to the soundblaster directly and not set to the master bus.

of course that in itself can cause problems, but not the problems you're describing.

another possibility, and I won't know for certain until you tell me what soundcard you're using) is that you were using the MS GS Wavetable for MIDI output.  if that's the case then you'd need to change to MME driver mode in order to get access to the MS GS wavetable.  cakewalk HS9 is pretty old, and I don't know anything about its menus.  but I'll tell you how to get there for Sonar home studio line and maybe they will be similar enough.

OPTIONS>AUDIO>ADVANCED>DRIVER MODE = MME
click OK
close and restart Home STudio
let the wave profiler run

then check all of your MIDI tracks and make sure they are set to MS GS Wavetable.

after all that, I would suggest you consider upgrading to Sonar Home Studio 7 ( or wait until the new Sonar X1 Essentials comes out) and you will then have access to some really great sounding softsynths.  even the GM softsynth TTS-1 that comes with SHS7 is much much much better sounding that the MS GS wavetable!

yes.  but you have to upload to a picture server like photobucket.com and then take the url of the screenshot once you've uploaded it, then click on the little picture icon in the reply box (looks like a mountain with a sun above it) and then paste the URL into the popup box.