Ok, I got my sound working with my previous kernel 2.6.9. I upgraded to 2.6.14 to get my nVidia graphics card to work. I downloaded the tar balls alsa-drivers and alsa-utils from ALSA's website. When I compile the drivers, everything seems to go fine. I get a few warnings here and there but no errors. I compiled the files in the alsa-drivers package like so:
make clean
./configure --with-cards=emu10k1x
make
make install
./snddevices
Then I compiled the alsa-utils package like this:
make clean
./configure
make install
I ran the alsaconf program which terminated successfully but loaded no modules. When I type modprobe snd-emu10k1x, I get an error. I typed dmesg, and the output was:
...
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_rawmidi_transmit
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_add
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_new
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_card_register
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_card_free
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_lib_preallocate_pages_for_all
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_card_proc_new
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_ac97_mixer
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_ac97_bus
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_verbose_printk
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_new1
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_card_new
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_iprintf
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_lib_malloc_pages
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_lib_ioctl
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_lib_free_pages
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_set_ops
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_device_new
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_rawmidi_new
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_hw_constraint_integer
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_rawmidi_set_ops
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_lib_preallocate_free_for_all
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_period_elapsed
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_hw_constraint_step
snd_emu10k1x: Unknown symbol snd_info_get_line
I know what an undefined symbol is. Why would it compile cleanly in 2.6.9 and not 2.6.14.2? What can I do to solve the problem?

I would guess that something is missing in the kernel that it needs to work. Did you use the exact same options to configure 2.6.14.2 as you did 2.6.9? What I would do is go back into the kernel menuconfig (or xconfig) and verify that all the ALSA options are selected. Also, the kernel changes things during releases -- is the ALSA version you downloaded compatible with 2.6.14.2? I'm not much of an aALSA export, but this is what I'd check.

Thank you, I managed to get ALSA to work correctly after installing alsa 1.0.10. However, I received a bunch of warnings on startup. Since I got all of my hardware working with my new kernel I decided to do a complete reinstall of linux. I did so and then reinstalled ALSA. It works perfectly now. Don't know what happened before and I guess it's useless to try and figure it out now. Thanks again.