System sounds keep turning back on

Hey everyone,

This is more of a software problem than a hardware one, but i thought i'd post it here. Any suggestions for another location are welcome.

I prefer having all of my windows system sounds turned off, which i know how to do, but for some reason they keep turning themselves back on whenever windows has to play an error sound, like when i have to close a window first. There may be more situations where this happens, but that's what i've found so far. It's really quite bizarre, and it has me constantly going back into system settings to turn them back off again. Any idea what's causing this?

fireberd said:

I've never had that happen. I use my PC for my Recording Studio (with Sonar) and have all system sounds off (disabled).

Do you have the "Sound Scheme" set to No Sounds, as mine is

Yeah, that's what i do too. I should mention that this is a fresh windows install. It's not a problem that developed over time.

fireberd said:

A question, do you use the regular PC sound or HDMI sound? If HDMI, I wonder if that is causing the issue?

Also, do you have the PC sound hardware driver or just the generic Windows installed High Definition Audio driver?

I'm not sure. Can you get that info out of these screenshots, or do you need something else to figure that out? I should note that i don't have any speakers plugged in, just some heaphones in the front jack. There does seem to be a strangely large amount of HDMI ports though. I'm not sure if my system actually has that many, but maybe i'm wrong. I wouldn't know what would qualify as such a port.

I have the realtek HD audio drivers installed. They came with the installation disk for my motherboard. Version 6.0.1.6767.

fireberd said:

I don't see anything out of the ordinary in your screenshots. If you are not using HDMI, you can ignore that.

Web cams have caused many sound problems. It may not the problem, but temporarily disable the web cam in the Device Manager and see what that does.

I do know that the drivers for my webcam don't agree with 64 bit operating systems, even though that problem has no right to exist, considering they're the most recent drivers for a fairly recent webcam. I haven't had this sound problem on my previous windows install though, which was an identical system apart from the storage.

I'll have to do some testing i guess. No idea if i use HDMI or not, and don't know how to find out, but if i discover anything at all, i'll see. Just need a reliable way of triggering the problem.

fireberd said:

You can disregard the HDMI. That was just a thought but it doesn't appear you are using HDMI.

I think i found the problem. I'm not completely sure yet, but it might have been because my system was configured to use two different keyboard languages at once. I'm guessing it associates different system sounds with it too, so whenever it had to play a sound that was in one language pack but not the other, it turned the sounds back on. This also solved a rare issue i had with my system thinking i pressed alt + shift at times (like when opening something that i had to put my username and password into), and a sound issue i had with skype. Highly bizarre. Almost like how windows thinks you don't own a legit windows copy when your system time is too far out of whack. Seems completely unrelated, but it's not.

i think this happens because of so many errors resulting into a sound or tone, that the algorithms in windows disable it (muting of system sounds will be disabled so you can hear them again) or maybe because of bluetooth headsets and ending a conference on zoom, stuff like that. it's ok if it goes on after a fews days automatically but not after a few hours.

'System Sounds' in the volume mixer keeps unmuting and resetting itself to 100% : Windows10 (reddit.com)
'''System Sounds''' in the volume mixer keeps unmuting and resetting itself to 100% : Windows10