playback too fast. Windows 10. audacity 2.3.3

[dibi]

Hello. I need your expertise! I have done nothing to change the settings in my audacity and yet the playback (and recording itself) is too fast.

This had happened several months ago as well and I had tried everything I could find as recommended on the audacity forum like checking the project rates, checking if I had the latest drivers etc. I rebooted, uninstalled and reinstalled audacity repeatedly, and nothing fixed it. Finally I gave up. After about a week or so, I tried audacity again and lo and behold it started working perfectly without me doing any changes.

Two days ago the speeding up problem started happening again. Please note that if I record directly from youtube using audacity, the playback speed is perfect. If I play my own personal recordings on audacity from previous to this glitch, the playback is perfect. However, when I try and record something new it plays back too fast, AND if I click the record button to add another track it starts at the END of the previous recording.

If I manually add a new track all kinds of skips and strange noises come out and it also is too fast.

What should I do to fix this? Thanks very much.