Ok, did some more googling, and apparently restarting the Audio Service in Windows helps solve the issue, which is interesting because this should be equivalent to a reboot, which didn't help me.
Just ran into that very same problem myself. Several fresh installs (normal and experimental), several reboots, deleted the old savegames etc, but since today i can't play that game anymore. It loads into the world, then even so much as trying to do…