Hi, Axon - looks like you're experiencing some type of weird behavior that I'm not familiar with. I'm going to just throw my thoughts out there to see if anything sticks:
When you press the push to listen button, are you hearing the sound that VA makes when you do this?
If not, there could be something interfering with your keyboard hook - make sure that there's not some other software that is using global hotkeys and interfering with VA's global hotkeys.
If you are hearing the sound, VA is successfully disabling/enabling, 'listening'. VA does NOT turn off or turn on your mic when listening is disabled/enabled. It is a very simple flag that indicates whether or not to execute a command when a speech event occurs (that way you can have a spoken command for, 'start listening').
In Options > System/Advanced, do you have, 'Enable sleep mode' checked? If so, try unchecking that box.
Do you think it has anything to do with this issue you were having before?
https://forum.voiceattack.com/smf/index.php?topic=2224.msg10340#msg10340