I found it really confusing that there is such a disparity of claims and often completely contradictory advice
I’ve complained about this already. This is borderline Secret Oral Teachings. Settings handed down from Audacity users in the nineteenth century. I don’t know anybody else who has to worry about this.
This is a lot like going on-line to get recommendations for the proper gasoline/air mixture for your new car. Wait. Don’t cars adjust that automatically?
Koz
those articles and advice are OS neutral. But I agree with your comment.
having said that, I have also had advice from Steve (your Steve) on the older thread about increasing the buffer. (can’t find it now).
yes I mentioned few times that I have a HP workstation desktop - big and powerful. I even sent you the specs.
those clicks are both under the voice AND during silence. They sound more like interference than missing parts.
I will produce and upload the file as soon as I can.
I mentioned few times that I have a HP workstation desktop
Sorry. I scanned through the message thread quickly and missed it.
That relieves us of one troubleshooting tool. You can’t check the system with the built-in microphone.
You really do have impossible symptoms. The microphone is broken in Audacity part of the time, but not Zoom. It happens on two computers. Buffer settings change the problem, but not solve it.
When you got the second computer, you set it up according to your jobs, desires, and environments and then made a sound check, right? You might have installed Audacity and the microphone first and did a sound test before you customized the machine. It’s super rare, but you can have apps hostile to each other.
There is a desperation move. Busy out the machine and see if the problem gets worse. Open Zoom but don’t close it. Just put it to sleep. Browse to Youtube, open a video and pause it. Leave it open. Does Windows Media still exist? Open it and leave it open in the corner of the desktop.
Launch Audacity and try to make a simple voice recording. You said you can hear noises in the Yeti’s headphone connection. If you get noises, do they change when you touch the Yeti?
I’ve proved it’s possible to pick up noises from your phone. Where is your phone during all this?
Koz
just quickly - my phone uses mobile data not wifi.
My PC is connected to the Internet via Ethernet cable not WIFI.
I don’t use WIFI or Bluetooth if I can avoid it (they burn my brain which I actually feel).
Come to think of it, my keyboard and mouse are wireless, but that’s not a strong field.
Will produce the file later today and hopefully this mystery that’s killing us will be solved!
my keyboard and mouse are wireless
You can experiment with that. When the noise appears, move the keyboard and mouse around, closer to, and further away from the Yeti.
My PC is connected to the Internet via Ethernet cable not WIFI.
Yes, those can all cause problems. Those are all radio services, a cousin to radio broadcast and over-the-air television.
That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s possible to get raw sound to fly through the air without hearing it. That’s how I got that iPhone sound. The phone isn’t connected to anything. Airplane Mode, no WiFi, and no Blue Tooth. That was electrical radiation from the screen.
The phone screen has thin wires in a grid pattern. The phone sends switching signals across the grid and that’s how the screen knows to put a blue color over here and a red color over there. That switching can radiate sound tones a short distance from the screen. It’s one of the many reasons they won’t let you step into a sound studio with your phone.
Try it. Set up for a recording and shine your phone screen closely to the sensitive part of the Yeti (the round wire screen just above the blue name). That Wish, Wish, Wish sound is me swiping between iPhone displays.
If everything goes well, your ticking sounds will get much worse as the phone gets closer.
Koz
ok, before I did your latest suggested tests, I have captured the clicks.
The first ones during silence are in fact, unusual. I have never heard them before. The “standard” ones are just one hard click.
There are also few clicks underneath the words.
Please note this is a compilation not a continuous recording. My mic was again behaving well so I grabbed a couple of clips from my existing files.
My phone is usually about 1.5 m away from the mic.
Enjoy! 
Terrific effects voice. I bet you’re popular in your oeuvre.
I hear the ticks clearly in the first 3 seconds of the sample. I also hear room ambience behind them and note that they have a rhythmic cadence. Almost like they came from a wind-up clock. Some mechanical clocks have unbalanced hands and the escapement makes more noise when the hands are on the uphill side of the face. The 9:00 side.
Did I just find the clock on the wall or shelf behind you?
Koz
Thank you. I don’t do effects though, only narration.
yes you did. I do have a clock on the wall behind me but it is digital not mechanical, and it is at about 4 o’clock position. I have no devices at 9 o’clock.
potentially you can hear the faint seconds hand in the background (I don’t pick it up in my headphones) but the hard clicks embedded in the audio have no rhythmic cadence and don’t even sound like the clock.
this second clip might help - the clicks are tiny and frequent, several underneath the voice, especially under the words: “truth” and “dimension” - sounding almost like some sort of tiny particles rubbing against each other…The cadence of the clicks over silence is incidental and somewhat misleading as it is also a compilation.
If you can’t determine their cause/origin from this clip, they will remain a mystery forever.
I give up.
Interestingly, I didn’t get an email about your reply. Strange.
Anna
Correction.
I can’t give up, as I do professional voice recordings and those tiny clicks which are audible and which I can’t remove drive me crazy, significantly delay my post-production, and if In the end I have to leave them in, they impinge on the perfect professional finish of my audio productions that I pride myself on.
So, if you can’t determine their cause and find the solution, where can I go?
I guess my main question at this point is:
Is the issue with Audacity? (in which case I need to get another DAW)
Is the issue with the Yeti Pro mic? (in which case I need to get a new mic)
Is the issue potentially with my PC soundcard or the USB connection? (in which case I will pursue HP)
I mean, there IS something that’s causing those clicks.
Determining the cause would certainly be a good step towards fixing the problem.
Your description of the clicks, and the fact that you say that it improves with a large buffer, strongly suggests that they are caused by “dropouts” (“xruns”), but then looking at the audio clips, they don’t look anything like dropouts.
Audacity has an option for testing dropouts. See: Recording Preferences - Audacity Manual
Is the “Detect dropouts” option enabled?
Are they definitely not mouth clicks?
The irregular clicks, most obvious between ‘truth…about’ and ‘dimension…of’, sound like mouth noise to me. This would go some way to explain why you went for a spell without them.
The declicker plugin, discussed and linked to in this thread, does a good job of removing them at default settings.
Maybe zoom’s processing/noise cancellation rendered them inaudible on the occasions you used zoom to record.
As for the earlier, different, clicks at around 1.95s and 3s-ish - is there a slight edit there? Maybe the release of a mouse click or a key press?
A good way to test that is to wait for a time when the clicks are occurring regularly, and record yourself humming (no mouth clicks while humming). If the clicks happen during humming, then the cause is likely to be something else other than mouth clicks.
Thanks Steve and GDepot for your comments.
The dropouts tick is there. No sign of any dropouts so I don’t think that’s an issue.
YES, I do have sometimes mouth clicks 
but they sound slightly differently than those unknown clicks which also appear on silence.
Both clips are compilations but that’s done in editing so no mouse clicks would be recorded.
THANK YOU! The De-clicker and De-Esser plugins sound like the solution I need! I have just installed them and will test them tomorrow.
Because those clicks are totally unpredictable, there could be just a nasty gremlin in my computer! I need to get a gremlin removal spell from my friend witch 
For example - when I have those non-mouth clicks under my voice, I re-record that word or sentence few times, and often (not always) manage to record a clear audio. A technical issue which cannot be replicated in any way for troubleshooting drives everyone crazy! I have even swapped the mic (I’ve got two Yetis) - same thing.
The ONLY noticeable improvement I got, as mentioned earlier, was the buffer increase to over 500. The clicks decreased by 80- 85%. Go figure.
I had this issues on Windows 8, and now on Windows 10.
Maybe we need a psychic to look into this
I will report on the effectiveness of these two plugins.
WOW. WOW. WOW.
Just the De-Clicker did the job, I didn’t have to use (yet) the De-Esser.
THANK YOU GDepot for your advice! Live well and prosper! and the plugin developer is a genus!
I’m curious though. These plugins were introduced on this forum in 2014. How come they were completely forgotten (until now) with so many conversations about clicks over the past few years driving everyone (including Koz) crazy?
I would suggest that they are INDISPENSABLE and should be included in the core list of plugins.
After all, fixing the issue is more important than identifying its cause through endless troubleshooting (as far as I’m concerned).
Phew…
I don’t do effects though, only narration.
By “effects voice” I mean your narration presentation. That’s not the voice you use to order coleslaw at the deli. I’m guessing anyway.
These plugins were introduced on this forum in 2014. How come they were completely forgotten (until now) with so many conversations about clicks over the past few years driving everyone (including Koz) crazy?
Because they have a terrible track record. People apply De-Clicker expecting it to Solve All Their Problems and when it doesn’t, everybody goes away disappointed. You may find it does an OK job with clicks in the silent portions, but not so hot for clicks inside words.
If it worked for you, then you win.
You noted that some clicks sound different than others. Nobody wrote anywhere that you can’t have two different problems. Just thought I’d be Cheerful Charlie there.
Koz
Words that contain sounds like “t”, “k”, “d” and other hard consonants tend to be “corrected” by the effect whether you like it or not. It “may” be possible to minimise these unwanted side effects with appropriate settings, but due to the lack of documentation and cryptic settings it’s near impossible to know what “good” settings will be. It might be nice if the developer of this plug-in took it beyond being an experimental effect, but it seems to have been abandoned. Nevertheless, it’s available here on the forum as some users find it useful.
Personally I think the best solution would be to find out what’s causing the ticks, though that is proving to be difficult.
It might be interesting to find out if the ticks occur while recording a different sound source (such as recording a portable radio with your microphone, or even recording silence - set the computer to record in the normal way, and leave it recording while you go out for lunch).
Glad to hear that’s brought you some joy, and prosperous longevity to you too!
As Koz and Steve say, the plug-in is rather opaque, isn’t a panacea and it would be far better to avoid the clicks in the first place, either with those buffer settings/mouth click avoidance technique/some other yet to be invented remedy for the yet to be identified cause!
I too find it invaluable, both for my own work and that of others I edit, but can absolutely see why it isn’t included as a native effect.
As you’ll have noticed, it takes considerably longer to do its thing than other tools, so I’d use it sparingly on particularly clicky sections and definitely not to whole chapters at a time.
and what a joy it was! 
I have been troubleshooting those clicks for …how many years…?
I haven’t tried De-Esser yet but De-clicker worked for me like magic -immediately. I didn’t even change any of the settings, just used the default. I can assume that De-Esser will work for me in a similar way - getting rid of the clicks problem. Finally.
My question was not a criticism, by the way, just curiosity that such a good tool has been forgotten. Perhaps it didn’t work for some, but then again - the Audacity Click Removal tool has never worked for me as it impacts on the quality of the voice - it drags it to oblivion together with the clicks. Perhaps I haven’t configured it correctly, and I definitely haven’t run several tests to do so.
I do appreciate that you guys are working very hard to give us this incredible free DAW and keep improving it in any way you can. I could not have started my audio work without it and I still stick with it to this day - not because it’s free but because I got to love it and I much value your (also free) support on this forum.
De-clicker was quick and easy to use and it worked. I used it on the clips of up to 2-3 minutes long, so the processing time is not an issue. It is still a lightening speed comparing to manually removing those clicks and re-recording the voice over and over again until those clicks could escape an untrained ear.
In my busy world fixing the issue is top priority so that I can keep going, and troubleshooting to identify the cause and document it for posterity takes a second place.
Thank you all for your assistance and contribution, especially my new friend GDepot!
Koz - thanks for clarifying your comment. For a moment I thought you’d wanted to hire me to quack like a duck
Because they have a terrible track record.
Actually, that makes perfect sense. You have an unusual, magic problem and I’m not that surprised that a correction tool that normally fails works exactly right for you.
hire me to quack like a duck
I’ll call you.
Koz
Quantum magic. The observer effect at work.
Of course. What else. After all, my podcast is called Quantum Living® and so is my website.
That’s what I do, that’s what I teach.