Hello, and thanks for your time.

I've been trying to troubleshoot this for months and I need your expertise.

I have what seems like an audio buffering issue with my 6 months old laptop PC, most likely related to Windows.

First the context:

- Lenovo Legion Slim 7i Gen8 (2023)
- Intel i7-13700H
- 32GB Ram (2x16 matching and memtested)
- Windows 11 up-to-date
- Reaper 7.10 (latest)
- Antivirus: Windows Defender
- RME Fireface UCX II - Asio driver (latest)

The entire system is very stable save from this particular issue:

Occasionally, when I'm making music on Reaper (and also listening to audio feeds from other apps through Windows), suddenly the audio from all sources becomes completely and severely distorted. This also applies to outbound audio going from a perfectly working mic to, say, Discord for example.
This would be comparable to a sampling rate issue or a very low buffer size on an interface, but the both the sound coming from Reaper and all Windows sources remain in this state permanently until I reset the audio stream by:

- Disconnecting and reconnecting it
- Using a Reaper action like "mpl_Reset audio and MIDI device.lua" which resets the audio interface entirely (like a panic button would)
- Relaunching an application to completely reset the audio stream
- And of course, rebooting the entire PC

The issue triggers suddenly, unrelated to workload. It will happen when I'm working on a track or just idling watching a video far from the keyboard. Sometimes thrice an hour, sometimes once a day. But it's always the same symptoms.
Once the problem has "triggered", it doesn't matter what load there is, the issue stays consistent until a manual reset.

I used to believe this was due to bad interface drivers but now I've experienced it on 4 different interfaces with different manufacturers and drivers, the last of which is a brand new UCX II. The RME menu also shows 0/0 errors detected in the USB stream.

I've replicated the issue outside of Reaper too so I'm fairly certain this is due to Win11 or a 3rd party background service. I've updated the BIOS, updated all drivers, reverted to old drivers to test it out.

I wasn't able to link this to a background task like an antivirus or something. I tried cleaning up a lot of background bloatware but to no avail.

LatencyMon readings vary but I tried tweaking power management settings quite a bit to get it very low and even then the issue still happens at the same frequency roughly. The usual DPC suspects are there but not much else: wdf01000.sys, ndis.sys, dxgkrnl.sys, ntoskrnl.exe

Thanks a lot for your time in any case, and have a lovely day!