Microphone not muting as expected, wondering why

[br0adband]

I have a ThinkPad W541 and running pretty much pure stock meaning just yesterday I did a pure clean installation of Windows 7 Pro x64 fully updated (simplix Update Pack ISO made from May 10th's update), and once the OS was installed the only thing I installed manually was the Intel Gigabit NIC driver (from the Lenovo driver store) so that I could then grab the latest Lenovo System Update software (which of course updated itself as soon as it was installed). I then allowed that to install all the drivers directly from Lenovo - I never hit Windows Update.

Now, the issue is that even with all the "pure" drivers from Lenovo on this machine, whenever I attempt to mute the microphone array that's built into the machine it never ever mutes even when the Control Panel applet says it's muted, nor the fact that the little orange LED on the F4 key shows it's lit and it still isn't muted.

That's not a good thing with me not being able to totally shut the mic up - I know I can disable the hardware (and yes that works) but that isn't a proper solution.

Anyone else ever have this situation? I've attempted:

- muting the mic manually in the Windows Recording mixer on the device itself, no effect
- muted the specific device in the Control Panel applet aka Microphone (Realtek High Definition Audio)
- making sure I have the latest drivers from Lenovo and deciding not to install anything else, not even those from Windows Update

Not sure what else to do. I did install Windows 10 on the laptop the other day for some experimentation (I can't stand the OS but I wanted to see how it ran on this laptop) and yes it was the April Creator's Update version 1803 and after getting that set up with the same method then installing Lenovo's ThinkVantage app for Windows 10 and everything else necessary, still the mic will not mute.

I'd hate to think it's a defect of some kind but maybe it is, I don't know, but I figured it couldn't hurt to toss the question out there and ask if anyone else has had such issues.

Thanks for any input on the situation.

Have fun, always...

[ThinkTwinki]

Try uninstalling the Lenovo drivers and let Windows use its own.