Windows 11 keeps changing audio output.

Yes, I am thinking that Microsoft has addressed the problem. Windows 11 has still replaced my original RealTek driver but at least it's no longer migrating. However, I now have a new audio problem. All my Zoom meetings start with an audio fail (where attendees can hear me but I cannot hear them), requiring me to restart my laptop at the beginning of every meeting. Such a time waster. No idea why this would happen when it's been working fine prior to the Windows Update that caused the audio problem in the first place.

So the issue hasn't showed up for me for a good while now. Perhaps it's been fixed?

If anyone else still has the problem, and you put your pc in sleep mode rather than off, try hibernate mode instead. Sleep does weird, unpredictable and annoying things and it's been like this for an incredibly long time, whereas (for me) hibernate does what I expect it to. Waking my pc from hibernate leaves me no surprises like input device changes and weird driver and service wonk like sleep does.

The culprit seems to have been found for my original problem.

Dell ended up installing a new main board. And that did the trick. Apparently three was a fabrication error near the jack output port that caused the trouble.

The so-called "developers" or "customer service assistants" that reply to these forum posts are not actual microsoft developers that do the code and everything. They're simply 3rd world paid slaves that know nothing about anything other than looking up "keywords" in their system to attempt to identify issues as per the "book" and provide neutral answers nothing more than akin to googling the question itself. Consumers come here to register their complaint as I am that every time I turn my pc back on after powering down it registers my monitor as a new audio output and switches over to it. Win 11 pro bla bla bla. All the specs don't matter. It's the OS doing it. But to expect an actual coder or developer to bonified read these posts is a far cry from wishing money wasn't the source of all evil.

Ridiculous. Every time I turn on the same monitors I have for years after Windows 11 boots up, they're added as new audio devices and one of them sets to default audio output. In Windows 10 I could just disable them.