Windows 7: Sound Output not Working Properly when there's an Input

I've observed this over the past few months, but pretty much, whenever I try to use Voice Chat in say Steam, it will either crash Steam or stop audio from coming into my headphones and resort to using my laptop's internal speakers. In the former of those two options, other programs will be unable to output sound to anything, even if I adjust where it will output its audio, and will simply crash (ie: foobar2000, anything that relies on Flash, etc). In any case, it's not only Steam doing this, but Audacity as well. There are even occurrences when sound will just randomly quit even if I don't try Voice Chat or something like that, and will still crash everything sound based.

What I want to know is what's going wrong and how can I fix this issue.