sound issue cropped up from nowhere!!

hi everyone how do i explain...i was just watching an anime and all a sudden for no reason my sound stopped working!! if i toggled from windowed to full screen the sound would work again. this would last for a few seconds to 5+ minutes. so i decided to go to youtube reasoning that the site i had been watching the anime series was having a problem, it started to do the same thing with youtube! clearly it was me who was having the problem yikes! this is an issue i'd never delt with before on any pc.
i uninstalled all my audio and gpu drivers and updated to the newest driver package from egva and tried to force a usb 3.0 driver update without success. i use onboard audio with usb headphones. any advice or information would as always be greatly appreciated.
as i have not installed any new hardware or made any driver or software changes for a long time that may have effect my sound i'm at a loss as to what else to look for!

Windows 7 64 home
Motherboard asrock z77 extreme 4
cpu intel i5 3570k 3.4ghz
ram corsairs vengeance 2x4 8 gigs
gpu evga gtx470
Case corsairs 400r

 

Is your sound card onboard/integrated (as the HD Audio Tag suggests)? It may be going bad and you may need an add-on audio card to replace it.

I just went to newegg.com and found out the graphics and audio are onboard. So you may need a PCI Audio card and drivers.

 

i hope not i just built this system a few months ago!....i'm sure it has to be some kind of software issue. although i haven't been able to find it yet.

 

The fact that the problem suddenly appeared out of nowhere suggests possible problems with the integrated audio. I've seen a lot of these types of issues posted here and all have been due to the audio chip failing for some reason (overheating, poor soldering job...). If you find that it occured after you installed some new software, great! It means uninstalling that software may correct the issue. But like they say, "#!@? happens".