Debian Multimedia :: Headphones - No Sound Is Recorded By The Speech Recognition Utility

My wife is taking an online language course that requires Windows in order to record and playback speech (for pronunciation training). I decided the easiest thing to do would be to clone a VM I use on my machine for tasks that can only be accomplished in a Windows environment. I did so, and successfully installed the speech recognition utility on the Windows guest VM. Unfortunately, although the microphone works just fine--I can hear my voice in the headphones--no sound is recorded by the speech recognition utility. Just to be clear, the microphone is fully functional under GNU/Linux. My wife has been using Skype without any issues at all. That is, Skype used to work. Somewhere during the course of trying to resolve the voice recording problem I managed to break Skype. I have no idea how.

It's a long story, but I'll try to be as brief as possible. When I could not get the VM solution to work properly, I thought maybe the problem was with the VM, so I checked the original copy on my own machine. No problem there. Windows sees and hears the microphone just fine (using the testing utility under sound configuration). So how is it possible that the microphone doesn't work in the cloned VM image? Before you stop me, allow me to note that both machines have identical motherboards, and both are configured to use the onboard sound. Sound works on the Linux host and the Windows guest VM. Both sound and microphone work in the original VM image on my machine, but only sound works in the cloned VM on my wife's machine.

If you've followed me down the rabbit hole this far, please continue with me a bit further as things get stranger and stranger. After triple checking all the setting in KMix (I'm running Squeeze/KDE on both machines) to be sure they were identical, I noted that I was unable to view/add/enable the "channel" option on my wife's machine. Why, I have no idea. As I said, the machines are identical as can be both regarding hardware and software. Out of desperation, I decided to set up an account for my wife on my machine. I created her account, made sure she had the necessary audio permissions, then cloned my VM to her account. Same problem.

I would love for someone to point out what I'm missing here. Same hardware, identical VM (clone), same permissions, same sound configurations in KMix and under the Windows guest VM. How is it possible for the microphone to work for me, but not for my wife? Is there some mystery configuration file somewhere that has magically been altered for her account alone? The worst part about this entire process is that I've broken my wife's Skype, which is a big deal seeing as we live in a tiny country in the heart of Africa and cell phone communications are very expensive.