Apologies for reviving an old thread, I've been having problems with the Realtek audio driver for a couple of weeks, there are very distracting and annoying volume changes caused by some auto level control in the driver that cannot be disabled, so I've been trying to get rid of the POS for the past couple of weeks but it keeps coming back with every restart. Itns 500 Driver Windows 10 there. I found this thread when Googling for possible solutions. This is also my first post on these forums. The solution in this thread, to deny access to the Realtek folder worked for me, but on every restart/reboot Windows would try to install the driver, fail because folder access was denied, then re-install the Microsoft driver. I learned this from the Events tab in the properties dialogue. This extended the boot time and increased hard drive thrashing.