Hi everyone,
several of my devices (a laptop, PC, and Surface Pro 2) are suddenly suffering from seemingly random lagging and audio problems. When the problem occurrs, I'm unable to play videos on youtube (for instance). The videos will start to run for a couple of seconds, then repeat this part for 3 or 4 times in a rapid succession and then fail saying that there was an error playing back the video. But even if video/audio is playing back to the end, the sound is stuttering and noisy and the computer seems generally laggy.
But the problem is not constrained to browsers. When a browser is open, minimized, and I run a video game, I get the same problems in the game.
Usually, closing or restarting the browser helps, but not always. Or it just takes a long time for the system to "recover". I tried Firefox and Chrome. Both seem to trigger the problem, though it appears to happen more frequently with Firefox. (Could Flash be the problem here?)
And another thing. I even happens that audio stops working, i.e. there is no sound coming out of my speakers whatsoever. Audio players like Winamp or iTunes don't do anything when you click the play button. They appear to be put in the "playing" state, but the positional slider doesn't advance. I don't get any error messages though. When that happens, I can only restart the system to get my audio back.
I have no idea whats causing this. I think it might be related to Flash, but I can't find anything on the Web. How can it be that I'm the only one experiencing these particular symptoms?
I'm using the latest version of FF and Chrome and Flash. I have installed all my Windows Updates.
Any ideas?? Thanks in advance.

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