Erratic startup behaviour with custom windows shell

[Mougli]

Hello, my use case is as follows:

I have a fleet of PCs used for offline gaming events where people bring their own controllers.

Playstation 4/5 controllers are often recognised as audio devices which makes them "steal" the audio when they're plugged in. Because different models from different brands might get recognised as different devices, manually disabling the audio devices isn't practical.

Looking for a solution I stumbled upon SoundSwitch and set it up to force the playback and recording the devices to what I want.

So far so good.

The catch is that the PCs are set up to use Steam Big Picture as the Windows Shell, bypassing Explorer and the traditional desktop, and I think this might be preventing SoundSwitch from working correctly, even though it's set to run on startup.

I can see in the task manager that it's running but it doesn't do its thing when plugging a controller in, unless I manually run the Soundswitch executable again (and then again, it seems to only work once).

I tried running the app on logon using the Task Scheduler, with and without a delay, but that doesn't seem to change anything.

Is there anything I can do to ensure that Soundswitch works as expected in that situation?

(If that makes a difference, the PC is running using a local user account without admin privileges)