Nergal thought this was my thread, and closed mine, so I might as well respond here. I am having a similar problem and have gone through a lot of troubleshooting steps. After going back to manufacturer audio driver and BIOS the issue seems to be that the headphones are not being recognized when plugged in. The front headphone jack is recognized, but I think it not working is tied to the rear not being identified. I had some issues on newer realtek drivers with the rear speaker output being listed as an input, but with the driver I have now everything seems to be identified correctly, but it is just listed as disconnected in playback devices because it is not registering. Could this be due to something deleted from the registry? Why would this not be restored from the either the ccleaner backup or from the system restore? Can I check if anything is missing by looking at the ccleaner backup?