Problem with sound jack mic.

I'm running an Acer Aspire laptop with Vista 64 bit. Here is my issue.

Headset works fine, speakers work fine, built in internal mic works fine, mic jack does not work.

Normally I would think it was some kind of hardware fault, but my wife has the same model laptop and hers went at the same time.

I tried updating the drives (One Realtek and one Nvidia) and still nothing.

Anyone have any ideas?

I checked Sounds and Audio devices and everything is as it should be. The mic is even being recognized, just no sound.

This one really has me stumped. I deleted both sound devices from the device manager and had the drivers reinstall. Still nothing. My mic was working without a hitch for months, then suddenly it's not. Like I said, I would have chalked it up to hardware failure if the same thing didn't happen on my wife's laptop. I checked it with a different headset and the same thing, mic is recognized but no sound.

I also tried a system restore to when it was working, that was no help either.