A couple of months ago I had another look at VRChat.
I rarely ever use it so was unprepared and tricked into stepping through a fake portal as a result of which I lost all sound in VRChat. I cleared the cache as I left however a week or so later I started having strange things occur on my computer, settings changing by themselves and later a popup window that streamed audio. It only went away after I quit Steam. I tried to get help from Steam?.. But they have not been at all helpful. I ended up resetting my system, deleting everything but when I reinstalled Steam I still got the changing settings thing happening. I have some old Win7 disks so might try to boot from them to reformat my drives but if anyone knows another way to deal with this crap I would love to hear it?
How is that relevant?
As I said I would be using the win7 disks to reformat my hard drives to ensure they are clean of any malicious code so I can reinstall Win 10 from a USB which could otherwise be infected the moment it was attached to my PC and thereby re-infect my system after formatting. I have already attempted resetting the system and the problem appears to be persisting. It may be that Steam changed something in their VR Dashboard that is causing the problem or it may be malicious code? But I need to be certain that my system is clean.
As usual, after formatting goes the installation, but nothing was said about Win10 and USB. 
How should I know? Maybe you were going to install Win7. If so then you couldn’t enjoy the amazing universe of VRChat. 
I will share information with you. You can format your hard drives with your bootable USB (even it is for another OS)
Besides, it is not entirely clear what happened to your settings there. Settings of what? Your system? Steam? or game? How does window look like?
tbh I don’t believe that this is due to malicious codes or something similar. If “strange things occur” and “went away after you quit Steam”, also if you “reinstalled Steam and you still have that strange things”, then probably you need to change something in your Steam settings.
Did I understand correctly that you are sure your problem is the result of that “fake portal”?
What mean “fake portal”? How is it work? Is it like world with untrusted url on player or something?
Could you give id of world, creator’s name or at least name of who dropped portal? This will be relevant.
About problems with your system, I recommend asking microsoft support
No idea who the people were that dropped the portal, this happened a couple of months ago. What is happening is the the power configuration settings for my PC are being changed. IE; Windows settings, system, graphics settings. Initially both Armory Crate and the Steam VR Dashboard were effected. Armory Crate was randomly switching from performance to turbo mode while the Steam VR Dashboard was switching from performance to power saving mode. After deleting and reinstalling Armory Crate it stopped changing it’s settings. The Steam VR Dashboard however continues to change from performance to power saving mode. Another strange thing that has occurred is that a window popped up with lines of code and ran itself after which I heard a stream of urban sounds and a person intermittently speaking Japanese. This only stopped when I stopped Steam from running. I have also had sound cut out while in other games on Steam, been kicked out of my own home network. From my own research I am aware that this “sound bug” has been around for well over a year now and yet has not been addressed? I could lose a years work if this bug has gotten into my storage. I am seriously thinking of lodging a formal complaint with the authorities. No doubt the imbeciles behind this think themselves clever. But while it does take a good deal of intelligence to create things it doesn’t take any to break them.
I wasn’t actually able to get Win7 to load, just sticks at the loading screen.
I live in a small country town so getting professional IT help is problematic.
I don’t absolutely know that it is the sound bug.
It could just be the result of changes made in Steam?
But that popup window I saw running code that proceeded the weird audio stream seems like it could only be the result of someone hacking my system.
Prior to that time everything had been running really well.
I have reported the problem through Windows but haven’t sought assistance on the Microsoft support platform as the problem seems to manifest through Steam.
It’s as if someone is using weaknesses in the Steam platform to attack my system?
When I use a different platform I don’t have any performance issues or other problems so long as Steam is not running in the background.
90% of the things you’re saying are unrelated…
Likely you’ve run into the notorious realtek/nhmatic driver issue.
Unity has known compatability issues with that sound system, even when not using that sound device as an output.
The usual way of fixing it is disabling nahmatic before starting vrc.
Additionally, an output of dxdiag would be useful for future reference as this likely isn’t something that happened by a vrc portal
(since vrc can’t change pc settings in the first place)
But something else that borked.