daveleb55,
I'm presently using Dragon 7.3 with Hal, when I frist started with Hal which was some time ago I tried the Microsoft and quickly stopped. There are two things I can think of you can check for, frist be sure your computer supplies the five volts required for the mic and the next thing would to be to check for 60 cycle hum, use the volume control under options choose properties recording and make sure mic is selected as an input, again options properties playback,
remove the check mark under mic and listen to the mic output, this should let you hear 60 cycles or background noise. Also a lot of computers offer a mic boost which increases the amount of amplifier gain but increases the noise to the mic.
Carl2