Okay... this one is very strange. When I boot my laptop with 2.6.12, it boots right into KDE and I hear the welcome sound during the login splash screen. When I boot with 2.6.15, I don't hear the welcome sound and none of the sound players produce any sound... whether using a GUI player or if I use a console player like mplayer. HOWEVER, if I then run alsaconf in a konsole window, alsaconf unloads all of the drivers and reloads them. THEN, all of the sound players work in KDE (and mplayer works in a konsole window). If I reboot after configuring ALSA, the sound is gone again. Every time, I have to boot to KDE, then run alsaconf, and then I can use sound. But it gets even more strange. If I boot into KDE, then run alsaconf and get sound, and then kill kdm to get back to a text console (where mplayer still makes sound) and then run KDE again, sound is gone *again*. So, it's not something wrong with ALSA at boot time (or else running alsaconf would fix it for the entire uptime... regardless of how many times I killed and restarted kdm). In other words, any time KDE is run, ALSA will be broken (both in KDE and from a console if I kill kdm) until alsaconf is run (either from a Konsole window or from a text console). Has anyone experienced this before? Any ideas? - Joe