Mac OS X: Cannot change volume

My wife recently had an issue where she could not change the volume on her laptop. When she turned it on, she would here the chime from the operating system as it shows the mac boot screen, but when in itunes, she could not get any sound from the laptop. I asked her some questions and did some research using Google and found out what had happened.

A few days ago she used her headphones to listen to some music without disturbing our napping infant. Well ever since then this problem has existed. I found out on the mac forums that someone else had a similar issue. When they plugged in their headphones they could hear sounds but when their headphones were pulled out there was no sound. The solution is to plug a pair of headphones into the headphone jack and unplug them repeatedly. For the guy in the forum it took 9 cycles of this to get his sound back, for my wife it took approximately 8. Strange but it worked.

Hope this helps.

Chris