Microphone muting issue on Windows 7

[wtburnette]

My stepmother is having an issue on her computer where the microphone volume mutes itself constantly. The webcam/mic worked fine for about a year and suddenly started doing this. I go in and set the volume to 100 and click off the muting and a few minutes later it's back to the same thing. I scanned with malwarebytes, but not sure if it could be something else. From online searches it seems pretty common. There used to be a AV/malware sticky in the forums with a ton of tools, but I couldn't find it again.

 

[muz_j]

I haven't come across this sort of problem, but reinstalling the drivers, for the microphone - if there are any might be smart and I would suggest testing the microphone on another computer if possible to help isolate the nature of the fault. it doesn't sound like a hardware issue, but you never know.
1) what sort of microphone is it?
2) can you narrow down the time window for when this started occuring? - that might help you isolate the root cause...
3) did any other changes occur to the system recently?

 

[BulletDust]

I have an issue where the Microphone simply stops being detected using Realtek hardware/drivers and needs to be unplugged/replugged in order to begin responding again. Is this the same thing?

 

[wtburnette]

Well, it ended up being two separate issues. I uninstalled several hinky programs and ran a full MBAM scan and that cleared up the muting issue, but it still didn't work. Uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers for the webcam and after a restart, everything was working as it should. Thanks for the suggestions