I understand your frustration...

I've written an application that reproduces the issue but I don't want to post it and get banned from the forums. I'd have to have Ariellendera's permission first. If Ariellendera can elevate this to a software developer I've pretty much pinpointed the code (as much as I can without actually having access to the code) that is the issue.

SE is using XAudio 2.7 as the audio backend. When the sound card device becomes unavailable for any reason you need to reinitialize all of the XAudio backend after catching IXAudio2EngineCallback::OnCriticalError() or you result with no audio playback.

The other solution is to move to XAudio 2.9 and windows 10 which obviously isn't a solution because it removes support for anything older than Windows 10.