Thanks for the clarification Jim. I figured the issue lay with the OS rather than MC, but it is nice to know specifically why it has to be reset each time.
I gather from Dawgincontrol and Eve's posts that they need to reset the WDM option regularly. For me it only crops up for me during an install of a new MC major version, and is not affected by MC minor versions (ever) or Windows updates. My setup is very simple - computers straight to speakers with no fancy audio equipment in between. So maybe that's the difference?
While it is not terribly arduous to reset the option and then start MC a couple times to get everything back to where was, it would be a bit of PITA if you had to do that every few months/weeks.
I don't use the JRiver WDM Driver but the same logic applies, I would assume the trigger is when the driver is rebuilt (a new version), that would require user intervention.
This is a good thing, drivers can be extremely dangerous from a security standpoint, thus, a user should have to okay them first
Obviously, I'm not talking about the security of JRiver's WDM driver because there's 0 concern there, but drivers in general.
Not sure if this overcomes the problem but could JRiver include a 'Wizard' that auto launches after an upgrade if the user's configuration has the WDM Driver enabled and prompts them to re-activate the driver?