Microphone trouble

[Variety of Cells]

So I recently did a reinstall of windows 7, which of course has created more problems than it has fixed.  But there's one in particular I'm having trouble sorting out.  I have a microphone that mounts nicely to my headphones (but not integrated into the headphones).  Before the reinstall it worked great, but now the volume is super low and there's a ton of static when I turn the gain up to 30 and volume up all the way. 

My mobo is a p8z68-v pro gen3 with realtek onboard audio drivers.  I've tried reinstalling those drivers multiple times, and switching to the drivers from the realtek website vs my motherboard website, but that hasn't worked.  Messed around with a whole bunch of settings in both the realtek audio manager and the Sound panel in windows, to no avail. 

Unfortunately I don't have another microphone to make sure it's not my mic that happened to go bad at the same time as the reinstall.  My cheap little webcam has a mic that does sound better than my microphone, but that's going through usb and not through realtek.  Makes me think realtek is the problem. 

Which leaves me with 2 options as I see it.  I could buy a cheap sound card and hope that fixes it, or buy another microphone.  I don't really want to do either one, but I've been using the microphone a lot lately and I'd like it not to sound horrible.  Any thoughts?

[RVR II]

The mic doesn't work on either the front nor rear jacks?

Odd that it would not work after a fresh re-install

[Variety of Cells]

I should clarify.  It works, as in I can hear myself.  But that's only if I stick the gain up to 30 and the volume all the way up on the microphone.  And when I do that there's a ton of static and I still can't hear myself all that well.  That was not the case before the reinstall.

And I've tried both the front panel input and the rear input, both give me the same results.  I even switched the front panel from hd audio to AC97 on my motherboard, but that sounded even worse, as if there was some weird interference. 

[RVR II]

I've had similar problems using Skype where the mic would work on one computer but not another..

I just bought another mic and windows 7 picked it up, installed the driver, and it worked.

[Variety of Cells]

I've heard that getting a mic with built in sound works well.  I just really like the mic I have because it mounts nicely to my headphones that I already have.  And also I don't want to spend $100 on a microphone.  At the same time, I don't want to spend $20 on something that isn't going to work any better than what I have now. 

[Variety of Cells]

Spending money is an annoying option so I've kept working at it.  There's a 'noise suppression' toggle in realtek that needed me to quit out of the program for it to actually work.  I sound a little mumbly with it on, but it's much better than all the static.  Perhaps noise suppression was on before I reinstalled windows, and I just never really listened to what the sound quality was like.  I think I'll be able to live with this option.

Oh and by the way, listening to yourself speak into a mic with a quarter second delay is really freakin trippy and makes me slow down my speech to a crawl and want to curl up into a ball.