Windows Audio and sounding like a chipmunk/on helium!

Well I just set Stereo Mix as the default and so far so good. I'll be more certain after a re-boot but I'm in the middle of something now so will do that later.

Its been a day. How is it going?

Hi Fireberd, I just had a quick try and all seems good! I'm marking solved. Thanks all for your help. :)

Great. Hope it stays.

Nope - it didn't! I realised in the middle of the night that I'd left my PC on both last night and the night before as I was archiving material to my NAS. I've just re-booted and tested Skype: the chipmunk lives!

Rats.

It was OK until restarted. Look at what is in startup, could be something there causing it.

Obviously the only way to go through startup properly is to disable them all and enable them one by one, re-booting each time. Ugh.

Before I try that - this is what is in my startup. Anything that you can see that I might try turning off just in case?

I think the problem is within Skype, not the drivers. Try resetting Skype settings.

Steps:
1. Kill the process Skype.exe using taskmanager
2. Open the Run dialog and enter
%appdata%
and press enter.

You should now get a new Explorer window opened.

3. Find the folder named Skype and rename it to Skype.bak
4. Restart Skype and set it up again.

NOTE! you can always restore your old data from the Skype.bak folder.

slicendice - I might agree if the problem was restricted to Skype.

Skype is not in my startup at all. I could go and open something like Audacity and record myself and the result would be the same with no involvement from Skype. It's just that Skype is nearly all I use my microphone for.