a) no sound card entirely
b) legacy beep driver has been disabled
c) the legacy beep driver has been uninstalled
Sometimes RuntimeErrors are raised, sometimes they're not. If _have_soundcard() returns False, don't expect winsound.Beep() to raise a RuntimeError, as this clearly isn't the case, as demonstrated by the various Win32 XP buildbots.
why in a new comment. My home Win98SE box is one of the "real systems"
alluded to (my system "default sound" appears to have vanished sometime
in the last month, that's certainly not a Python bug, and the MS
PlaySound docs are correct in their explanation of what happens then).
Bugfix candidate. If someone can still sneak it into 2.3.1, that would
be good.