Just FYI: Media Center includes a cool feature that provides the system with an ASIO driver that can play through MC's audio engine (including all the DSP effects and other processing).
This is pretty cool, and handy when you need it.
Unfortunately, a few ASIO applications do things... Well, I'm not going to say that they "shouldn't do" (though that could be argued), but they do odd things when loading ASIO drivers on the system (probably to deal with semi-broken ASIO drivers from hardware makers).
In any case, if you encounter one of these, you can turn off the ASIO Driver entirely as explained by 6233638 above, and that should fix it. In some cases (such as with SVMS 13) the issue only occurs during installation, and then you can safely turn the ASIO driver back on (uninstalling MC was overkill, as just disabling this feature would have done the same thing).
Hope that explains things a bit. If you don't need the ASIO Driver feature, there is no harm at all in leaving it off.