Lately, Im having a strange problem. I'm using SuSE 9.2 on a HP-nx7010 notebook. I have absoulutely no complaints. Until now. Every so often, my sound just stops working. Everything seems normal though. If I play a sound, all of the screen uotput shows that it's playing but there is no sound output. Of course I checked all the mixer settings and I restarted alsa a thousand times. It seems that the only way I can get my sound backk is to reboot.
My question is this. What can I do that will give me the same result as when I reboot wothout rebooting? Like what service can I restart or how can I rescan al hardware like a reboot?

Are you using KDE? KDE has its own sound system which will sometimes take control of the sound card and not give it up to other non-KDE programs. There are settings in the KDE control center you could try tweaking.

Instead of rebooting you could try killing artsd (the KDE sound server daemon) or switching to runlevel 1 then back again (it aint pretty but it it beats rebooting, at least until you find out what the problem is).