This is symptomatic of the speech engine or something in your system affecting the speech engine (hardware and/or software). VA works on the events of the speech engine, so when you see a red microphone or or red, 'x' or other constant icons appearing at the top of the screen, that means that VA is being told that something is happening by the speech engine. That means that the speech engine is either, 'hearing' something (too loud, too quiet) or no audio signal at all.
There have been cases where a new speech engine gets corrupted right after an install or after putting in a new one. I would suggest trying checking the boxes next to, 'disable acoustic echo cancellation' and 'disable adaptive recognition' to see if that helps if you don't want to try replacing the speech profile (although replacing the profile has helped in a lot of cases). Also be aware that long-running, non-asynchronous commands (commands that have the box, 'allow other commands to be executed...' unchecked) will cause your commands to back up as they wait on each other. Also, also... make sure your plugins are not bogging down VA (low chance, but just be aware as well).
In regards to the account, it's not frequent that I delete accounts. The policy here is that if you create an account and have zero posts for 60 days, the account is purged and you will have to recreate the account. If you make even just one post, the account is not ever removed. I did a check and I did not see another account for your email address. There was point when hosting was changed a few months back and it could have gotten washed out then (I think it mostly affected recent messages). If that's the case, sorry about that.
Alpha- The PTT feature in VA doesn't have anything to do with the speech engine, believe it or not. Nothing is ever actually, 'muted', as there are verbal commands that can override, 'not listening'.