@161019.

I might have found why you are having your issue. While trying to debug an unrelated issue on a windows 7 laptop I've still got laying around, I updated ARC to the latest version and started to get the same message as yourself (and I deffo have a sound card installed)...

The "pandorabot control" responded but the "speech recognition control" did not. How I fixed it was to change the "Language" in the speech recognition config menu from en-GB to en-US, saved the new settings then closed the ARC project. When I re-opened the project again the recognition loaded successfully (with no error message this time) and the voice recognition control worked again.

Hope that helps in some way.