Sound Doesnt Work On Headphones To The Front Port

The problem is that when I'm listening to music or playing a game, the sound works just fine on my speakers. But if I plug in my headphones to the front port, the sound continues to come out of my speakers, and not my headphones. The only way to get the sound to come out of my headphones and not the speakers is to re-launch the application that is producing sound. The same is true vice-versa (going from headphones back to speakers). I have set my default output device to be the headphones and have played around with every setting in the Sound Blaster and Vista Sound control panels I can find - nothing seems to work.

I have read through other forums with similar issues, but they're all either a different issue (i.e. they get sound out of the speakers and the headphones - I only get it out of one, and not the right one), or the threads seem to have dropped off unsolved.