Windows 7: Steam/Team Fortress 2 - Speaker Issue (Randomly Disabling itself)

So, I have been having an extremely weird issue involving speakers, headphones and any game (mostly TF2) I play on steam can cause this through the steam browser, alt tabbing or just joining servers.

So, a minor problem I am having is that whenever I join a server or have a browser (steam browser or firefox) opened, the sound has a random chance of cutting out. It is only with the game (test from speaker setting still plays the chime) and a common way to fix it is to toggle the "silence game audio when in the background". This can usually fix it, but other times I have to reboot TF2 to fix it.

A huge issue (which has happened seldomly, but gets frustrating) is the same trigger causing the headphones to die. When playing a game, I usually prefer headphones, and as such, I play with volume loud. And since I play expert mann up and suck at it, I usually have something in the background to keep my spirits up. Well, whenever this ugly bug wants to occur, it usually decided to disable the headphones I am wearing (even when still plugged in), and play it through the speakers. Scares the piss out of me. Unplugging and replugging doesn't work, disabling the speaker and trying to set the headphones as primary does not work (says it can't be default device, no reason why, just won't let me set it as so.) This problem has to resolve itself. I have no idea why. Sometimes, after leaving it unplugged for a while, it will (for a short duration) play through the headphones, then switch back to the default speakers

My computer specs are: HP Pavilion dv7: Windows 7 64 bit home edition, intel Core i5 processor, nvidia Geforce GT 430M 1GB, 1 TB of hard drive space, if anything else is needed let me know