i recorded a stereo drum track, went to record a guitar track only to find the stereo drum track had been re recorded on the new track as a mono track with no guitar at all. sounds like some routing issue. i’m just using an onboard realteck sound chip on an aging laptop. any ideas. i know this is newbie stuff, but i’m a newbie. 
That happens when you record Stereo-Mix or Mix-Out or whatever your computer calls it instead of a real audio device like microphone or your sound card internal electronics.
You want to record one of those things if you record YouTube or Internet audio. You don’t want that if you’re playing a guitar into the computer.
Change in Windows Control Panels
It’s the opposite of this…
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Mixer_Toolbar_Issues#Using_the_Control_Panel
Koz
thanks for the reply i’ll look into this. the last thing i recorded was in fact some stereo drums streamed from the sonicreality site so maybe the internal mixer is still stuck at whatever setting it needed to enable that. and in effect it is still recording whatever the computer itself is playing be it from a website or in audacity.
i seem to have fixed this issue touch wood ;
right click speaker icon in sys tray.
select properties > volume > options > properties (again) > untick playback radio button and tick recording and make sure microphone is also ticked > another mixer appears, tick select on the microphone strip.
it appears i have to do this each time i open audacity as the default is for this mic box to be unticked.
hope this helps someone. thanks for steering me in the right direction. 
it appears i have to do this each time i open audacity as the default is for this mic box to be unticked.
It’s possible that Audacity itself is resetting that “for you.” Open Audacity Preferences > Recording and make sure what you want is selected there as well.
Restart Audacity if you change anything like that.
Koz