ok, I have slackware9.1 on a notebook with AC97 sound chip. After I compile the new 2.6.6 kernel and installed Alsa 10.4 I can't get the sound to work. Yes I added sound support into the kernel compilation but not Alsa since I'm going to installed that by myself. With my 2.6.6 running I installed alsa packages version 10.4 (alsa-driver alsa-lib alsa-util) by compiling from source then convert to slackware PKG with checkinstall. The thing is when I run alsaconf, for a fraction of a second before the program start I see

"line 33 : too many argument"
"line 34 : too many argument"

then alsaconf starts and detected my sound card normally. After that when I try to run alsamixer, here comes another message "no mixer elems found" and I can not play any sound eather in console or X windows. I've tried uninstall all the alsa 10.4 packages using pkgtool to revert back to alsa 0.9.6 where once it used to work with my old kernel, but this time I compile from source. While I was compileing alsa-driver 0.9.6 I got one error in compile and can't proceed. I think I'm at my wits end, any suggestion?

Do yourself a favor and get the offical packages from a slackware mirror. They work VERY nicely.

Strange, actually the problem is solved now but rather in an indirect way.
To start with, i installed Wine from source to find that it made my linux unable to boot. Then i booted up with DamnSmall cd to check wether the kernel is present, the lilo and make uninstall Wine from source dir. I booted up linux, all is ok now, ran alsaconf and alsamixer and guess what now it worked. Now i have sound on linux. Tried lsmod and i see loads of sound modules there which used to be absent back when I had sound problem. Strange

A similar thing happened to me, I spent ages trying to get sound working properly in SuSE, but I could only get it to work through Arts. Then one day whilst booting it got stuck initialising the sound card, so I had to just turn off my computer. From then on, perfect sound all the time.