Good news you solved it. I’m fascinated by what you say about the RealTek driver needing to be present for BIAB. That makes no sense to me and I hope you can get an explanation.

About HD drivers in general, I always Disable them rather than Remove them. Otherwise Windows puts them back every time it updates! Very annoying. For others reading, I’m referring to drivers for devices we who have good audio interfaces never want to use, such as the internal sound chip or especially things like monitors (screens) that have their own sound. I learned from Noel Borthwick at Cakewalk SONAR that the existence of such drivers actually limited how many tracks SONAR could have. I would bet that most people here who have a monitor with its own speakers have an active HD driver visible in Device Manager.

BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.