Audio loss after X amount of time?

I recently did a refresh of win8, not by choice but I was getting BSOD on boot after a bad install of nfs+ paragon .

Anyways I reinstalled almost everything but I have this problem that I notice as a audio problem at first but seems to be much bigger. I will open a video on youtube say, the video will play but there will be no audio. I go to open the audio control panel or anything pertaining to it, the window for it will either freeze or refuse to open at all. Aside from that, after I noticed this or even before I notice this I also can't open up most apps, noticeably steam games, they will start too load but then freeze on load. No Idea what is causing this and I don't know what else to upgrade driver wise. Very fed up since the refresh could have been avoided in the first place...

This is more than an audio problem. Suggest you consider reposting on one of the other forums. The "General Support" may be a good place to start. There is obviously OS problems.

This sounds like a OS registry issue and nothing to do with your drivers... Check for system registry errors... Back in the days of XP these could easily be fixed by changing the text in the corrupted file... now I'm not so sure... It may be time to wipe your hard drive and reinstall...