While not the same issue, I had a recent one that took many hours over several months to solve. It came down to a setting in the audio card driver causing the issue (which it shouldn't have).
If you can turn off all audio driver settings, it might help.
If you're doing anything remotely interesting, check to see if any calls you're making rely on something at a lower level. Sometimes there are oddities that can happen, and you may have inadvertently created something like a race condition or god knows what.
