As andybob suggested, I did replace the Realtek drivers with the Microsoft HD driver - that did not change things.
Specific steps were:
- Shutdown Roon and remove the “RAATServer/settings” directory to get rid of any residual Realtek devices.
- Reboot after installing the Microsoft HD drivers and restart Roon -> the devices were present as expected,
- Enable the devices I needed and shutdown Roon to test and see if the issue would reoccur upon restart.
- Restart Roon and the issue reoccurred (no local devices found), meaning it was not the Realtek drivers.
Next steps;
andybob’s advice to reinstall drivers lead me to see what else could be causing it. The only driver I have that’s probably not commonly used in our community is DTS Play-Fi from https://playfi.com/apps/windows/.
[Update- I left out a chunk of the story]: I removed the play-fi device from the RAATServer/settings directory and restarted Roon - the issue went away - all of the devices were present.
Then to see if that may be causing the issue, I enabled the Play-FI device, shutdown and restarted Roon only to find that all devices were still present; I repeated the shutdown/startup sequence several times without any problems (all devices present)… I also used Play-Fi, by selecting as a zone and sending music to the Play-FI speakers, shut down and restarted Roon and went right back to playing music on the same speakers - no issues with other devices either.
Bottom Line: Enabling and using Play-Fi does not seem to cause the issue, but when the issue occurs, removing Play-Fi from “RAATServer/settings/” does seem to correct it. I will have to verify this when it occurs again.
I know Roon is not intended to be compatible with Play-Fi, we had that discussion sometime ago - I just hope they can live together - Having Roon send to Play-FI speakers is a major benefit to me…
My thanks to everyone for their help getting to this point. Let me know if there is something else I should be checking.
-Steve