Realtek HD sliders "frozen"

This may be more of a software than a hardware issue, but perhaps
someone has encountered this before. I have an HP Pavilion with XP
Pro SP3. It uses the Realtek USB sound system. Everything works
perfectly, except when you bring up the Windows mixer for recording,
the sliders for Line and Microphone inputs are "frozen" near full
volume. The Master slider moves, and the Mute boxes work for all the
sliders. If you bring up the Realtek Sound Manager, the sliders are
missing completely,

I have completely removed the Realtek drivers, and then done a full
install of the current ones, as well as the ones which came with the
computer 3 years ago. No help with either, and the slider positions
are identical. There does not appear to be a MS default driver, since
it offers me an older Realtek driver.

It did work once, but I do so little analog recording that I don't
know when the failure occurred. Someone on another group reported the
same thing, and that it was related to SP3.

Any ideas on the cause, or finding it? Googling did bring up a few
hits on the missing slider issue, but no fix that I found.


--
Alan