Audacity not resetting audio balance on startup (hearing loss)

[Coincident]

Due to having significant hearing loss on my left ear, I need to run windows with a 20% boost on the left channel so that I can hear centered sound.

However, each time I launch Audacity, something resets the sound balance to default.
After reading about it in the forums: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=109638
It looks like the culprit is the fact that Audacity is establishing a new initialized sound connection to Windows on startup.
Is it really necessary for Audacity to establish a new connection when it starts? Is there a better work around?

I use a wide variety of high-end audio editing, recording, and composing software, and no other application has this behavior.
I've been an Audacity fan for years and I really appreciate how far the open source community has taken the app. There are some tasks where Audacity's simplicity and efficiency excels when comparing to even the most expensive solutions in the industry. But this repeating problem negatively impacts my experience, and I'd hate to be forced to give on Audacity over something like this.

The solutions proposed on the forums usually involve buying/fixing broken hardware. But with hearing loss, the situation is quite different, as you can imagine.

Is is possible to change the way Audacity establishes a sound connection on startup, to prevent the problem of sound balance reset?

[Coincident]

I've noticed that this problem doesn't just occur on startup, it also occurs every time I change the recording device inside of Audacity:

I suppose changing this drop down also triggers a new sound connection to Windows.

I wonder if there's a way for Audacity to:
1- Check the current sound volumes of all channels for the device
2- Establish the connection like it is doing now
3- Set the volumes as observed in point 1 back to the device

Might this be a feasible/desirable solution?

[Ryan-Miller-Audacity]

@Coincident For some reason or another I haven't been able to reproduce this on my windows machine with a variety of different settings. Would you be able to provide a specifc set of consistent reproduction steps/maybe a screencast to aid outr efforts? This is something that we'd certainly want to look into fixing.

On a side note @Tantacrul I know we have talked about something maybe similar to this in our design meetings (Changing Audacity levels manipulating Windows sound), so to me it would see that if/when we do that task this concept/issue could be covered there as well?

[Coincident]

@Ryan-Miller-Audacity thanks for taking the time to look into this!
After further testing, I realized that this might be a hardware-specific problem. It happens when using my dedicated sound card (Creative SB X-Fi Titanium) as the default sound output, but if I use my on-board sound card (Realtek), the problem does not occur. But seing as, in the forums: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=109638 this problem seems to have happened to several people over the years, I assume this might happen to several types of sound cards as well.

As for your screencast suggestion: do you mean recording my desktop environment as the problem happens?
If so, does this help?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80tf6wLn9cQ

(let me know if you need something else)

[Ryan-Miller-Audacity]

Thanks for the additional info @Coincident and the screencast!

I do not have a dedicated sound card on either of my machines to be able to test this successfully against what you mention above, but perhaps @dozzzzer does and he can take a look and see if he can reproduce? Regardless this is something we should be looking into fixing.