We have been struggling with a growing problem over the past two months. Seemingly randomly ALL sound from the computer gets routed to the lync speaker phone, or for those with headsets, to the lync headset. We are using Lync 2013 with Polycom
cx300 and cx600 Lync phones. A quick look at the Polycom forums basically said we make the phones Microsoft makes the drivers. Talk to them. Here is the proof:
Polycom Forums
We went to sound properties to make sure the defaults had not changed. They had not. Speaker was still set as default device, and the phones were still set as default communications device. When I right click on Speaker and test, I get an
error.
"The Device is being used by another application. Please close any devices that are playing audio to this device and then try again."
We ended up finding a temporary, short term, workaround. I go to device manager and right-click on Intel Audio Driver and click Uninstall. It then uninstalls the driver. I rescan for hardware changes, the driver comes back and then the sound is fixed. For a random amount of time. Some machines are a few days, some machines are a couple of hours. After the 4th or 5th recall for this problem.
We did more digging, and for a certain model laptop Dell E6520, we actually seem to have found a permanent fix. We Uninstall the IDT High Definition Driver, and choose delete driver during the uninstall. We re scan and it installs a different driver. For this machines the issue has not returned.
However, for our Dell E6420's and E6430's this is not a fix at all. We do not have the delete option so our only option to this point is to, on these machines, is to delete either the Intel Display audio driver, or the High Definition Audio driver. We do this over, and over, and over again. I have tried all the iterations in the Sound properties by turning on and off Exclusive mode and it's two options. It didn't matter. It still happened.
I'm looking for any other options. Polycom says talk to Microsoft. Dell after several different driver version tries, tells me to contact Microsoft. Everyone at this point is pointing Microsoft being the problem.
There is another post about this from 1 or 2 years ago, but it was never resolved, at least it wasn't stated so in the post. I posted to that thread hoping maybe the OP would update it in case he ever found a permanent fix.
If there is any other information needed or desired, please let me know. I will provide if I can.