Windows Audio stopping intermittently

Question

Every 35 minutes approx. my audio ceases working and I must restart the audio service (net stop audiosrv) in order to get it working again for a while, it's driving me nuts, especially because all the programs that are using audio when I restart the service stop sending sound and I must restart them.

I've checked physically all my audio cables inside my computer case, I've updated to the latest drivers VIA offers me (I'm using its onboard audio, VT1705, package version 10.12.00.30, driver version 6.0.10.1200 on Windows 8.1 x64).

No amount of googling has served me with a solution... but I've found some interesting clues in the Windows Event Viewer, under "Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Audio > GlitchDetection" and there are lots of messages that happen around the time my audio crashes, messages like:

Engine Glitch: CP Server Output Endpoint - Read Pointer Overwrite: pCCrossProcessServerOutputEndpoint=[0xf413890070] WriteOffset=[2486] ReadOffset=[2486] BytesToWrite=[448]

Engine Glitch: CP Server Input Endpoint - Starvation: pCCrossProcessServerInputEndpoint=[0xd6f76003f0] WriteOffset=[2048] ReadOffset=[2048] BufferSize=[3840] BytesAvail=[1920]

Here are my full .evtx logs: http://www31.zippyshare.com/v/I0zzxXmY/file.html

Answer 1

After several amounts of tinkering, I found a possible solution (I haven't had any more crashes).

My VIA drivers also install some files which are property of Creative, and I, in a spree to get rid of anything useless from my computer, disabled a lot of services, amongst them there was the "Creative Audio Engine Licensing Service", so I reenabled it and started it and now everything's fine.

TL;DR: Make sure even the littlest services that have anything to do with your audio, windows audio, drivers, third party audio libraries and else are enabled.

Yet another complication enabled by DRM?

Update: I still got some audio service crashes after this, but a lot less frequently. It seems fixed now that I've updated to Windows 10 and I've let Windows Update take care of the audio drivers.