Realtek HD sound sliders "frozen"

[Alan Biddle]

I have an HP Pavilion with XP Pro SP3. It uses the Realtek USB sound
system. Everything works perfectly, except when you bring up the
Windows mixer for recording, the sliders for Line and Microphone
inputs are "frozen" near full volume. The Master slider moves, and
the Mute boxes work for all the sliders. If you bring up the Realtek
Sound Manager, the sliders are missing completely,

I have completely removed the Realtek drivers, and then done a full
install of the current ones, as well as the ones which came with the
computer 3 years ago. No help with either, and the slider positions
are identical. There does not appear to be a MS default driver, since
it offers me an older Realtek driver.

It did work once, but I do so little analog recording that I don't
know when the failure occurred. Someone on another group reported the
same thing, and that it was related to SP3.

Any ideas on the cause, or finding it? Googling did bring up a few
hits on the missing slider issue, but no fix that I found.

--
Alan