Windows agony

Mostly I’m fine with Win 10. It has been reliable and unobtrusive, if pretty awkward to manipulate.

Until the plague hit. My audio system has gone bonkers, erupting in a storm of noise whenever a sound is triggered, so obviously Cubase is not going to work.

I’ve tried checking for viruses (all clear) uninstalling recent Microsoft updates and backing out recently installed applications and uninstalling/reinstalling all of the drivers that might be involved all to no avail. It’s still broken,which is a pain since otherwise (eg for Photographic application) things are working perfectly. My latency monitor says that some system function is holding on to exclusive use of the CPU for too long, which sounds a likely explanation, but I don’t know what to do about it.

So I thought I’d ask the community if anyone has faced this sort of problem and found a way through. The only thing I can think of to do is a clean re-install of my C: disk, which is the last resort and a two day job.

Help me Obi Wan, you’re my last hope.