The behaviour of winsound.Beep() seems to differ between different versions of Window...

    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.

diff --git a/Lib/test/test_winsound.py b/Lib/test/test_winsound.py
index 5606c44cc09eccb6a8ef41ef8eb5c26c34514aa1..1c524c976ef3ff1cf4adf88b69ab1f489db3b21b 100644 (file)
--- a/Lib/test/test_winsound.py
+++ b/Lib/test/test_winsound.py
@@ -26,8 +26,16 @@ class BeepTest(unittest.TestCase):
             winsound.Beep(37, 75)
             winsound.Beep(32767, 75)
         else:
-            self.assertRaises(RuntimeError, winsound.Beep, 37, 75)
-            self.assertRaises(RuntimeError, winsound.Beep, 32767, 75)
+            # The behaviour of winsound.Beep() seems to differ between
+            # different versions of Windows when there's either a) no
+            # sound card entirely, b) legacy beep driver has been disabled,
+            # or c) the legacy beep driver has been uninstalled.  Sometimes
+            # RuntimeErrors are raised, sometimes they're not.  Meh.
+            try:
+                winsound.Beep(37, 75)
+                winsound.Beep(32767, 75)
+            except RuntimeError:
+                pass
 
     def test_increasingfrequency(self):
         if _have_soundcard():