Recording Levels

Hello everyone,

Various programs such as Steam, xFire, Skype, Live Messenger, and more, like taking control of my recording levels (or volume).

They all seem to think that my mic sounds better at 100% volume... All this does is create extremely bad sounding static.



I have found that my mic sounds best when it's set to a level of 20. Is there a way to permanently freeze my recording level so that no program has the ability to change it?

It's becoming tiresome to open up a game, try to use my mic, only to find that my mic reset to 100%, thus causing all the people i'm playing with to heart a nasty load of static.

So again, is there a way t FREEZE the recording levels so that they cannot be altered?

Thanks.