M Audio interface not recognised

I'm running Windows 7 with an M Audio MK2 interface. Recently I had a problem where the interface would not be recognised by the PC. If I plugged the interface in via usb it would appear to power up, and if I plugged an instrument in I could hear it playing through the attached monitors. But the PC would not communicate at all with the interface.

I tried updating drivers, reinstalling, updating windows and a few other things, all to no avail. A couple of weeks later I turned the PC on and decided to try the interface and suddenly saw it installing the drivers and it worked!

This is the 2nd time this has happened. Has anyone had this issue before or know what may have caused it? Im just curious to know if I can do something if it happens again. Im thinking an some sort of update may have allowed it to work again. It's the only thing I can think of.

It's possible the HDMI interface to you monitor that's playing audio is interfering. If you go into your sound options you can control what you main playback device is...

Since I have external speakers and no audio in the monitor, I went into the Nvidia control panel and completely disabled HDMI audio ti mitigate shenanigans like that. I've read many threads on tech forums where HDMI audio has messed around with audio...