ALSA sound hanging..
 

I first noticed the problem when my system sounds in KDE, and i had originally thought it was KDE's fault, were not playing anymore and the sound in xine hung and kept looping a second of play.. but i restarted my laptop and tested mplayer / mpg123 in console.. mplayer played a 4 second clip but the last second of it hangs.. mpg123 hangs the first second of it.. i tried reinstalling and configing the alsa drivers.. everything was working fine and it just broke on me.. any ideas?

Did you upgrade anything, maybe the kernel or some other package? I'd try removing all the alsa packages, then reinstall everything from scratch.
good luck.