Note: I've already sent a tech ticket, just pasting my problem here in case anyone's run into anything similar and successfully solved it.
Since I've switched to Windows 7 (earlier today, had my WinXP crash and I decided - heck, might as well try the seven), I can't get any "hardware" based sound selections in the game menu (I can just select different "Generic software" choices). I've got a Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard with on-board Realtek sound, and I've tried three different versions of Realtek HD drivers:
-2.49: The latest one on the Realtek site.
-2.48: The one listed on the Gigabyte site for my motherboard model.
-2.40: Random earlier version to check if the problem is recent.
No luck with either of those versions. I've even tried removing the Realtek drivers and letting Windows set up their own, and I got slightly different Generic software sound choice, but still no hardware (I cleaned up the Realtek installations with Driver Sweeper).
Just to clarify - I can hear sound normally in Windows, and I can hear it in the game - I just can't seem to get hardware accelerated sound (which seems to prevent me from either hearing or speaking voice in-game).
I don't have any other games currently installed, so I can't try if it works in them, but I've dumped the dxdiag info and pasted it here: http://codepad.org/UCQMsMvc
Anything I can try before just going back to WinXP (and hoping that it'll work there with the new Realtek drivers because for the life of me I can't remember which version I had installed, and it was a pretty old one)?
Thanks.
Edit: okay, without actually changing anything (that I know of), the voice part of the sound options panel suddenly appeared, so now I can hear voice (guess voice is not tied to having hardware sound then, my mistake). However, I still can't select Hardware mode for the life of me.