Is there a way to restart audio without restarting a Windows 7 computer?

I also had to stop AudioEndpointBuilder and restart it

net stop audiosrv
net stop AudioEndpointBuilder
net start audiosrv
net start AudioEndpointBuilder

If you look at Windows' Task Manager's "services" tab, that might help you identify what services you have tied to audio.

Open up a command prompt as administrator and run:

net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

This restarts the Windows service responsible for handling audio.

For Windows 7, I used this and hope it will work for all Windows flavors:

1. Right click on My Computer
2. Chose Manage
3. Select Device Manager in the left panel
4. Expand Sound, video and game controllers
5. Find your audio driver and right click on it.
6. Chose Disable
7. Right click on the audio driver again
8. Chose Enable

It should start working now.

Check your device manager and go to audio in and outputs. Now check the box show hidden devices (in view) and delete all the devices other than the ones that you have when you didn't show the hidden devices. Reboot.

There must have been some leftover drivers that interfered.

Thanks for the answer, it helped me too. Something stuck in my sound card buffer and kept looping. I was not able to disable my card in Device Manager, (it wanted to restart Windows 7). But stopping the service helped, (though only that did not solve my problem alone).

So this is what I did:

net stop audiosrv
net stop AudioEndpointBuilder

Then I was bale to disable the audio device in Device Manager. Then I re-enabled it, and

net start audiosrv

This reset my card and solved my issue.