Sound problems after recent etch upgrade

[Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@gmail.com>]

Hello, fellow Debian users:

After a recent upgrade of my testing system, some sound apps work
(xmms, eg) and others (in particular, xfce4-mixer) do not, complaining
that there is no alsa device.  My sound driver - for the ESS
maestro chip in my laptop - is compiled into the kernel.  (As an
aside, I tried recompiling, with the driver as a module, but 2.4.27
gave errors using both gcc-3.3 and gcc-4.0; that's odd, because I've
successfully compiled it with gcc-3.3 several times before.)

I installed alsa-utils and ran alsaconf, but it found no PnP, PCI, or
legacy drivers!  (I thought perhaps it didn't like drivers in the
kernel, which is why I tried to recompile.)

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Patrick