Hey folks, I was dealing with this particular problem with my wife’s new build, and thought I’d share a nugget.
TL;DR - If you install Windows 11 (potentially leveraging some debloat tooling pre/post install), and Windows refuses to persist per-application volume mixer settings after you close a program, create a key (with any necessary parent keys) at:
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\LowRegistry\Audio\PolicyConfig\PropertyStore
I set up my wife with a brand new build, and because she’s 99% gamer on her PC, we installed Windows. Rather than put her back on 10 and deal with an in-place upgrade when it goes EoS next year, we decided to put her on 11. I’ve heard mixed reviews of Windows “debloat” tools, but I decided to give it a shot to see if this could get a better base image for her (used ChrisTitusTech’s WinUtil/MicroWin). However, like these “debloat” tools often do, they can break some features, and we ran across one of those issues.
Searching around, it was hard to find anything to try and sus this problem out. Loads of folks reporting that they had the issue, but of course, little to know insight if this is a weird hardware interaction or perhaps an issue with the debloat tooling, just a lot of “install this volume manager tool” recommendations that legitimately don’t do anything to resolve the problem. Suspecting that many of the users having these issues were not reporting that they used a debloat tool though, I hit up the Github issues for WinUtil, and lo and behold, found some folks talking about a registry key where app volume mixer settings are persisted. Creating that key seems to have resolved the issue for her, but we’re monitoring to see if there’s anything else we need to repair to make this fix permanent.