Streaming video/audio crashes after 1703 creators update

[swmonty]

I recently updated my system to the creators update, and now I'm having very frequent issues with streaming video and audio. After my system boots up, if I immediately head to Youtube... I can maybe play 2-3 videos without issue. Then it'll just stop and nothing will play on Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Pandora, etc. until I reboot.

I typically use Chrome, but once the issue hits, it affects all browsers. Video on Edge will play, but at a very, very slow pace. Like 1 frame per second. I can reboot my machine, and this process will start all over again with things working fine until something crashes shortly thereafter.

I tried uninstalling the 1703 CU, but that didn't seem to help -- so I re-installed it. I've updated my nVidia graphics driver to the latest available. I've applied all recommended security updates. I tried temporarily disabling Malwarebytes and Windows Defender to see if one of those was blocking it. Still at a loss for what is kicking in shortly after startup that's nullifying all streaming media.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

 

[swmonty]

I think I may have solved my own issue, though I'm going to ride this out and see if it breaks again in the near future. For now, everything is working -- and the culprit isn't what I thought it would be.

At one point after a soft reboot, even locally stored media files would not play, which told me it wasn't a browser issue at all. I use a Sound Blaster X-Fi Go Pro USB unit for audio. I changed the "playback device" from that device to my monitor, which has its own speakers, and Youtube videos immediately worked.

So I simply re-downloaded and re-installed Windows 10 drivers from the Creative Sound Blaster website, and all appears to be good. I do contend that the 1703 update is what broke it, and even a CU rollback didn't solve the issue, so I had to do a complete re-installation of these drivers.