Windows 8.1: Volume Mixer Interfering with Media Playback

[ChitinBirds]

So, about two months ago, I started having problems with playing videos on Youtube. Videos would take an excessively long time to play, or they wouldn't play at all. This would happen on both Firefox and Chrome, and would also happen in Windows Media Player. This was also happening with videos and songs dragged and dropped into the browser.

At first, I thought this was a problem with HTML5 media playback, but I recently discovered that it is the Volume Mixer that is causing media to not play. Media starts playing only after the Volume Mixer has become unresponsive and responsive again. This only affects songs and videos with sound.

I am using [url=https://www.asus.com/us/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG_G20AJ/]this computer model[/url]. Most drivers are up to date. Antivirus scans are done weekly with no threats found. I updated the driver for Realtek High Definition Audio earlier today, but that has effectively stopped all song/video with sound playback.

Please help me. I've been struggling with this for two months with conditions either not changing or getting worse.

EDIT: Okay, so my problem seemed to be that Windows did a bang-up job at installing the driver. A manual reinstall fixed all of my problems.