Hi Joel, thanks for the quick response. What I didn't mention in my post is, that I've had this problem two other times with the same hardware but different installations of Windows... and the other two times, the problem simply went away eventually leaving me to forget about it. What's strange...

Hi! Registered yesterday just to reply to your post because I am experiencing the exact same problem. It is so frustrating to continue to find every guide and video saying the same thing over and over again. "Go to Windows communications tab in sound preferences and set it to 'do nothing' "...