This started to happen few weeks ago: Every time I start up Windows, the global sound volume is set to muted. I was able to just click the muted button to un-muted and that was fine, until now: Now I cant even click that unmute button! Every time I click the unmute button, I hear a split of a second the music I play, then it stops immediately. It is maybe 10 milliseconds until it mutes it again.

In theory I could write a program to click that button continuously, but is there another solution to fix this? Or is this a broken hardware problem and Windows knows it and therefore doesn't allow me to enable sounds or my computer would break apart?

Any ideas what could be causing this? A weird virus that's purpose is to piss me off? That weird this whole issue is, really, doesn't make any sense at all.