On my SUSE 9.3 box I tried watching some .mpgs, using xine. I've mucked around with this box enough to get xine to play mpgs, though I'm still not getting audio.

Well, the mpg locked up. kill failed to clear it out, so I ended up having to use kill -9 to get rid of it. It did, however, get some lock on the audio device, and when I did the kill -9 it wasn't released.

Now no audio works on this box at all. XMMS says "please check that...no other program is blocking the soundcard." KMix is showing the speaker icon with the little red 'x.'

I know if I reboot, it will probably fix this. How do I fix it without rebooting?

I've seen this before (or something much like it) and it was corrected by rebooting. I'm with you. I'd like to know what got locked and how.