I’ve just spent a few hours trying to get a plantronics headset working on Windows 7. I’ve actually given up with that, but since doing so, my sound card completely stopped working with an error suggesting it could not find anything plugged into it. When running the windows diags, it told me – Audio device is disabled. Not fixed.

Wow this brought back some memories. I remember getting this problem on the old windows machines we had here at work. I believe we have some very restrictive registry policies set on our DC, causing all sorts of problems. I guess I’ll have to look at resetting the main group policy.

I eventually found a fix, which was to run the following from a command prompt (as administrator) –

net localgroup Administrators /add networkservice
press enter then type:
net localgroup Administrators /add localservice
press enter then type:
exit
press enter and restart your computer

I hope it helps you, as it did me!

Now, to figure out why it happened in the first place and reset that old GPO!