Something like this?
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/strange-cracks-on-start-recording-even-without-voice/46653/1
Are you set for Auto Windows Update? There are pages of Google hits of Windows 10 updates messing with audio services and systems. Anything in that post help?
Have you ever done a cold shutdown? Shift-Shutdown. It will take longer, but Windows halts and resets more things than in a regular shutdown. Long Shutdown complaints were “fixed” by leaving some services set and running during a restart. That’s not useful if you have something wrong.
Did you recently change software? Anything, whether or not it has sound in it? New Game?
Can you make it worse? Is there anything you can do that seems to make the noise worse—or change the problem? I’m interested in your impression of the noise after the cold restart.
Open and leave open Windows Task Manager. You’re looking for stuff running at the same time or with a higher priority than Audacity. I recently had odd operation problems and it turned out background Firefox was “stuck” on a download animation management process and taking up gigs of memory doing it. There are Adobe Registration processes that can slowly take over your machine, quietly in the background.
Koz