Audio Randomly Stops Working And Can't Get It Running Again?

i decided to use a 32" plasma vizio tv for my monitor. connected it through hdmi to my nvidia 460 gtx graphics card. image was terrible, sound did not work for anything but video games (unless i ran the video game then turned on something else like music or a movie), the sound does not work causing whatever program being used to crash. so i said to myself, picture isn't great enough for the sound issue and i disconnected the tv and returned to my old monitor using a vga cable with dvi converter for the graphics card.since this terrible decision i've had a recurring issue with my sound not initializing when trying to play music, movies, or games. also, after the computer is on for some time, all audio crashes completely, and nothing can be done but a restart to get it working... kind of.

1) my system starts up and all system sounds work great! then i try to play music on windows media player... it loads a song continuously but never plays... so i turn it off and the window closes but the process remains open in task manager forcing me to end its process. to get sound to work again i have to go to Internet.com and play a video (which sometimes fails because of the same issue).2) wmp aside, another issue is games not starting up because of sound failure. for instance, counter-strike source will load, reach the splash screen of the main menu and will crash... the splash will remain visible with a loading sign on the bottom right corner. alt-tabbing doesn't work, hitting the windows button doesn't work... have to end-process . and again i have to go to Internet and run a video to get my sound working again.

3) third and most irritating and unique issue is with netflix and silverlight. when i try to stream a movie on netflix, silverlight loads all parameters until actually playing the movie, where it freezes because again the sound doesn't initialize. i've found an odd work-around to this issue however. that is to play a Internet video and then play a netflix stream movie, in which case it works fine and i can close Internet and continue watching the movie. this method also sometimes works with wmp and video games also.4) the core issue is this. after some time, my audio completely goes away. nothing brings it back; no Internet work-around or launching a game. when this happens, even windows sounds are completely dead. trying to raise or lower volume through volume control in the taskbar causes the volume control to freeze on screen, forcing me to end task the sndvol.exe process to get rid of it.

basically i think the problem lies in my video cards audio drivers interfering with windows audio drivers. now to remedy the situation i went to device manager and disabled all nvidia high definition audio drivers... this didn't help. i also resorted to uninstalling my sound card and removing the card itself from my system, which also did nothing. i am completely at my wits end. can't think of anything else to do, but postspecs:nvidia nforce 680i sli motherboardintel core 2 duo processor at 2.4ghz4ghz of corsair xms 2 ram ddr2 1088 mhz (i think)nvidia geforce gtx460 sc 1024mb750 watt powercreative labs x-fi fatality series gaming sound card (removed this)i now use the logitech g35 usb headset (good enough)running windows 7 ultimate