Is there a setting for how much background noise the mic picks up? Me and my friends use Skype when we're gaming and sometimes there's a huge amount of noise from the TV and other stuff at my friend's house. When he taps the mic a couple times, the noise goes silent for a while but comes back when he doesn't say anything.
So I feel like the mic is thinking it's supposed to pick up the TV when it's the only sound around and somehow automatically boosts it? Is there a way to make it not do that?
I think its the driver of the soundcard, look there for something. Could be called something like "smart-adjust" or "auto-adjust-levels". Try it with these things turned off. Alternatively under the Windows Sound Options, under recording devices, select your mic, go to properties -> Advanced -> untick "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device".
These things fixed similar problems for, but I can't provide a definite solution.
Some programs like Skype and GoogleVoice (or whatever their plugin for calling through the web browser is called) ignore the hardware and scale the microphone level in software. To fix them, turning off options like "auto-adjust audio" or "boost microphone" in the software might work. I have resorted to solving the problem with push-to-talk (Skype has push-to-mute that you can invert by clicking the mute button in a call to make that hotkey push-to-talk) and by using other software like Mumble and XMPP (Jitsi client right now).