Realtek Audio / Feedback in Ventrilo

Problem: In ventrilo, if I talk when someone else is talking, they hear horrendous feedback (I've used the record feature to hear what they are talking about, and it's god awful). This is a vista/7 specific problem, it never occurred in xp, not ever. At first it sounded similar to the symptoms of something like stereo mix being unmuted and me relaying everything I hear over ventrilo, but I can't stress enough that I have every single capture and playback interface disabled that I'm not using. So under my win7 and realtek control panels, the ONLY things enabled are as follows: Playback | Speakers, Recording | Microphone. Each being set as the default just in case (even though all the others are disabled lol). All settings in ventrilo are correct as well, nothing conflicting, right interfaces selected, etc. I've turned the internets upside down looking for answers to this problem, and the closest I can get is people who think they know it all, giving such great advice as "make sure it's plugged in all the way" and "lol make sure that stereo mix is off!". Also, I think it's worth mentioning that this problem occurs regardless of whether I have headphones on or off, with or without speakers, etc. The symptoms would point to something like my microphone playback not being muted (even though it absolutely is) which would lead to my microphone possibly transmitting everything I say over and over again until it becomes a jarbled mess of feedback. Anyway, I'm at wits end, and if anyone has had similar problems, please don't hesitate to post a possible solution.

Does this only happen in Ventrilo? If you can isolate the problem that should go part way towards solving it. Are you able to test another application to see if that suffers from the same problem? What happens if you mute all audio outs?

Also, are you using the latest realtek drivers (may be worth a shot). It seems odd that there's a feedback look coming from somewhere.

Ian, I can't thank you enough for your reply, prompt and helpful as always. What I did to further troubleshoot this is I went to realtek's site, got the latest "Windows 7 / Vista" HD Audio drivers for my audio, uninstalled the old, installed the new. That went just fine, then I also installed the latest version of Ventrilo (I had 3.0.4, now I have 3.0.5, hadn't realized there was a new version until I checked yesterday). I haven't been able to recreate the problem as of yet, however it's important to note that this problem has happened randomly, and this is probably the hardest problem I've ever had to troubleshoot, and I'm not kidding. So, in short, the problem hasn't happened again yet, I'll keep testing with friends/recording see what happens, I'll report back within the next few days. Again, I really appreciate the feedback (pardon the pun), this is a really helpful forum for Windows 7 related issues.

No problem Rob, fingers crossed that this has fixed the problem .