hp pavilion ze4900 problem with audio

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@verizon.net>]

I am very grateful for Joey Hess's Bug report Bug#287344, detailing problems 
with rc2 install of debian to a hp pavilion ze4900 . 

I had been unable to install debian on my brothers laptop for a few days - 
kept getting the oops.

Now I succeeded, using his method of blacklisting the i1810_audio module in
the hotplug and discover modules.

(i am running  the debian sid with the rc2 installer kernel 2.6.8-1 kernel and 
then now the debian kernel 2.6.10-686)

but when I tried to  try to get the sound system working, I failed. I run
kde for my gui. 

I applied my usual method for working with sound ( i dont understand it... but 
it works on all my debian systems ...i found it on the web...)
i do lspci|grep audio
add kernel headers for my kernel to system
run module-assistant
run alsaconf
i tried speaker-test and nothing happened :(

in fact i then got a weird problem with artsd taking over all the cpu usage
 to 90+% with error messages to my screen ("cpu overload aborting")

I then googled and saw redhat bugs about this and it said to switch the
settings on the sound system -> select audio device
in kcontrol from autodetect to alsa. That didnt really help with continuing
the cpu overload errors and the errors with 97% cpu usage by artsd until i 
finally did 
uncheck enable sound system. Now my pc works but without sound. :(.

How to get sound working?

Thanks!

Mitchell