Sound Settings Messed Up...

I’m having my first real sound issue, and am not very technical to be able to sort it out.  I’m just starting to work with music on my PC, and have been trying out a couple of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) packages for this. I've been trying a DAW called Cakewalk for a week or so, and a couple of days ago downloaded another, Cubase Pro 13 to try/learn.

At first, it seemed to work fine (even though I could do almost nothing on it yet), and I was trying to follow tutorials to learn it, but found that whenever I had Cubase open, I couldn't get any sound out of Youtube. ChatGPT "helpfully" advised me to go into my PC sound settings and prevent applications from taking exclusive control of my sound. That's when the problem started - I couldn't get any sound at all out of Cubase (or Cakewalk) after that, though other PC sound was fine and the indicators within these programs showed that there was a signal being generated. Switching the PC sound settings back to where they were didn't work, even after several restarts.

Someone advised me to download and install ASIO4ALL drivers and try that. That helped a little. I switched the DAW settings to this new driver, and now I can get sound out of the DAWs (though with Cubase, I often need to fiddle around a lot in audio settings to get even that), but I still can’t record anything.  It look like it's recording and it does show a signal, but when I stop the recording, there's nothing there.

And if I switch back to the General Low Latency drivers (the default driver setting in Cubase), there is again no sound at all.

I’ve been playing around in the audio settings of the DAWs, but nothing seems to help and it’s really frustrating me.

Does this make any sense to anyone? Does the story above give any clue as to what the issue might be.