Okay, this is driving me nuts. Black screen, fans ramp up, and about five seconds later Windows comes back like nothing happened. Then this pops up:

USB Audio Device Properties
Device status:
This device cannot start. (Code 10)
{Operation Failed}
The requested operation was unsuccessful.
its always while alt-tabbing out of a fullscreen game. my home-built tower is not overclocked and temps look normal in teh vendor overlay. the only change I can point to is the GeForce Graphics Driver update from NVIDIA. ive already restarted a dozen times, obviously. is there a log somewhere that tells me what actually timed out, or am I stuck guessing?
DNS. its always DNS