Audio stream keeping system from sleeping

[Lord Method Man]

So my desktop won't ever go to sleep on its own (telling it to sleep works fine). I've ran powercfg -requests to see what is preventing it from going to sleep when I leave it idle and I come up with this:

 

 

Doing some looking around it says that somewhere there is an application or service running that has an audio stream open, but I don't know what that could be. I know I can do a command to have it ignore the request and sleep anyway, but I would prefer to find out what is doing it instead. Is there a way to track down what is using the audio stream?

 

My sound card is a Realtek ALC889; I have Realtek onboard audio on some other Windows 7 systems that don't exhibit this behavior though.

 

Here's a few system specs:

 

AMD Phenom II CPU, GeForce GTX 580 GPU

Windows 7 x64 & Internet Explorer 10

 

System tray programs running:

 

Skydrive

Steam

MSE

Logitech Gaming Software

Blizzard Battle.Net Launcher

Curse Client

 

[Mobius Enigma]

Start by disabling your sound card in Device Manager.  

Then see if the system can properly sleep.

 

If your system does sleep, wake it and do a restart. If it still will not, try restarting anyway.

Then look for any Events or even software notifications identifying what is trying to access the sound card.

 

This could be as simple as a driver issue. (Grab the latest ones from Realtek) 

Or going to the other extreme could be spyware that is actively monitoring your microphone.