dv2416 Microphone Problems

My HP dv2416us is having microphone problems.

For the first few months, the laptop was able to record with the internal microphone.

A few months later, I decided to try the Vista clean install found on this forum. The microphone still worked for a while. However, a little while later, it started failing and recording a LOT of static. I have attached a zip file of what it's recording - one which of when it is silent and one of which it is attempting to record a song.

I originally thought it was a hardware problem. However, yesterday I was going to do a clean install again. This time, I decided to restore it to factory settings with my restoration disks and get things from the SwSetup folder I failed to last time. When the restoration was complete, the microphone was recording fine without all the static.

I thought it was fixed, so I did a clean install again. However, when I was done, the microphone went staticy again.
I can probably conclude this is a driver problem. I've downloaded the Conexant HD driver from HP site and I still see this problem.

Does anyone have any solutions? I've also tried changing the "Default Format" (sample rate and bit depth) but to no avail.