LinuxQuestions.org - two questions: mouse and alsamixer

In my course of making my Slackware 9.1 system better I have changed a few things recently. During those changes something has happened to my mouse and my alsa. I started with a normal 9.1 install but I could never get alsa to work with x right. I decided to try the 2.6.2 kernel and the alsa that is part of the kernel worked perfectly. I had also set up my mouse (a usb) to get the scroll wheel to work using imps/2 and zaxis 4 5 in the XF86Config. But I wanted it better. First I recompiled my 2.6.2 kernel because I accidenlty left out ntfs support (I dual boot with xp and need it). I then downloaded the lates xfree86 (the beta RC3) and dropline gnome (I use gnome). I uninstalled the previous xfree through pkgtool and install the new one. I then installed dropline gnome. I have gotten dropline and xfree86 to work and am typing in it. Now first my touchpad is working (it didn't before these last 3 steps), while that is a good thing I can no longer use imps/2 to get the wheel to work on my usb mouse because if I turn it on in XF86Config the pointer goes crazy and is useless. I have also tried adding another mouse to the XF86Config following an example from someone else. I made the device "Mouse2" and I added the line

InputDevice "Mouse2" "SendCoreEvents"

near the bottom bellow the normal mouse to get it to work. However all this did was hang x and I had to press the power button and turn off the power to get out of it (it also hung my keyboard). The first question is how do I get the touchpad and the usbmouse to work together with the wheel on the usb mouse. And if I can't how can I get the touchpad from being recognized (I have no idea how it is since I turned off all support for it through the kernel config before recompiling).

About the sound. As I said before I had the sound working with the fresh install of the 2.6.2 kernel. Now after all of this I don't know if its working because I cannot access alsamixer to unmuet and turn up the volume because of the following error:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

thanks in advance for any help.