HP DV5-1017nr Vista Sound Issues

About 2 months ago, i upgraded my HP Pavillion laptop to a Dell and "recycled" the Hp to my wife, which was a big upgrade for her. In doing so, I restored the laptop which had Vista Home Premium 64-bit and also reinstalled all of the drivers that came with it. here lately, it's been receiving the occasional Windows Updates for Vista and for the most part, has been working fine. My wife also likes to play games on her laptop and she has one in particular that she's fond of, which is some casino/slots game. When she plays the game, the sound comes in very loud so hse tries to lower the volume, but it doesn't work. The DV5 has capacitive controls at the top of the laptop for volume, WiFi, and audio/video playback. When she "swipes" her finger across the area for increasing/decreasing volume, she gets the familiar "click click" sound but no actual hardware response. I recommended that she download the latest drivers from IDT, which didn't work and neither did the latest ones from HP.

In short, the sound issue has now spread to the OS volume control (the systray icon) and when she calls up the dialog for it and she swipes her finger across the controls, the slider goes down and then automatically jumps back up and you can hear the "click click" sound go haywire.

Unfortunately, i had this issue before and I do remember fixing it, I just can't remember how I did it so if anyone else out there has/had the same problem, any advice would be appreciated.