It seems that I got SAPI working. I toyed around with the effects a little, and I was surprised how decent the results were. Because my primary programming project is a roguelike (not an audio game), I wrote some dungeon crawling style stuff while trying out the SAPI effects..
Well, if you ask me an audio only dungeon crawler would work surprisingly well! The idea is to use a text adventure like interface combined with Rogue-style random dungeon generation. I have uploaded an example of how it mind sound like if you play the game. It goes a little fast because there are no delays which would otherwise be there because of user input. I.e. to take the battle axe you type 'take battle axe', to attack the orc you type 'attack orc' etc. text-adventure as I said.
What do you think of this? Would you want to play such a game?
Here is the demo link:
http://todoom.sourceforge.net/audio_rogue.zip
(I hope it works for you. I have only tested it on Windows XP. The game is based on SAPI 5.1)