Windows – Video and audio in all applications unable to play past first frame/second

Update 2 :
I have at long last found the source of the problem. This appears to be caused by my Logitech G35 headphones.

https://forums.logitech.com/t5/Logitech-G-Headsets/G35-Crashing-My-Sound/td-p/886186

It's apparently a known problem, and has yet to be fixed.

Update:
This same issue has appeared on another completely different system. It must be software related, something similar between the software on both machines must be causing the issue. The new machine is running Windows 8.1. A possibly related or unrelated issue that has popped up at the same time is that mmsys.cpl will not open (the audio device manager from control panel).

This also seems to affect Audio as well, something I had not noticed since I rarely listen to music. It may actually have something to do with audio rather than the video.

Whether I am watching a video on YouTube, watching a downloaded show in VLC, or streaming from Netflix, I have an intermittent problem where no videos will play past their first frame.

For any application that can play videos (Chrome, Firefox, VLC, WMP, Quicktime, etc) if I start a video it will show only the first frame and stop playing. Sometimes (but not always) I can seek through the video, and it will just be stuck at whatever point it was set too.

The problem pops up randomly and usually lasts for a few minutes. Rebooting will fix it, but it will come back later. If a video is playing there seems to be no problem, but once one ends if I try to play another it might not work.

Sometimes the page with a video will crash, or VLC might stop responding. But not always, in some cases everything seems to work perfectly except the video isn't playing.

The weirdest part is that while in most cases video is broken across the board, sometimes I can play some things in some applications.

• In VLC I have only tried playing .mp4 files (I don't have anything else to play). VLC seems to always be effected when this happens.
• Windows Media Player won't even show the first frame, it just seems to fail to load anything.
• In Chrome there is some inconsistency, sometimes Flash works even if HTML videos will not.
• In some cases only YouTube seems to have a problem. Sometimes nothing seems to play accept Hulu.
• Netflix almost never works right.
• Sometimes for HTML video instead of hanging on the first frame it seems to be unable to load the video at all.
• The Netflix Windows 8 app sometimes just hangs at 97% loading.
• Many times Firefox can still play video just fine even though Chrome can't.

I am totally perplexed by this, and its effect of all applications. I have done all the basic steps, rebooted, updated software, reinstalled software, checked for malware, installed all my windows updates. Everything I could think of. I search for info online, and wasn't able to find anything similar to this problem. I couple of threads about VLC freezing, but they didn't sound like this problem, nor did they have any solutions.

System specifications:

• 2013 14" Razer Blade
• Windows 8
• CPU: Intel Core i7-4702HQ
• GPU: Intel HD4600 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M
• Solid State Drive
• 8GB RAM

And on:

• Windows 8.1
• CPU: Intel Core i7-2670QM
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 540M
• 8GB RAM

All graphics and system drivers have been updated via Razer Synapse as as per manufacturers instructions. On the other system drivers are all up to date.

Since this same problem is happening on two systems with different harware configurations I have to think it's a software issue. I followed the advice of one answer and contacted support, Razer RMA'ed the Blade, they reloaded Windows and I have yet to get it back so I don't have any way of compairing the software on the two computers