Sound server not initialising

[Aquarius <aquarius@kryogenix.org>]

The KDE sound server doesn't seem to initialise when I boot my machine.
I don't get any sound from KDE at all (or, indeed, from anything else).
I've got "Sound I/O method" set to "Open Sound System". If I then go
into the Sound Server config and explicitly set it to "Open Sound
System" again (i.e., change the dropdown to something else, then back
to "Open Sound System") and Apply, I get a dialog box about restarting
the sound server -- saying "yes" works, but it then blocks other
programs from using the soundcard (XMMS says that it can't open the
audio). I normally have to randomly play with the Sound Server settings
a bit to get it to work, but unfortunately I don't know how I get it
working. I appreciate that this is not a lot to go on, but does anyone
have any suggestions?

Aq.

-- 
from string import *;import re,base64;w=base64.decodestring('YXF1YXJp'+
'dXNAa3J5b2dlbml4Lm9yZw==');u='['+lowercase+']';print re.sub(u,'-',w)
while filter(lambda x: x in u,w): s=raw_input('Letter:');u=filter\
(lambda x: x != s,u);print re.sub(u,'-',w)