Next problem:

I put in an audio cd. I start Kscd and play. The counter always remains at 00:00. It may say "playing" but it's not. I've checked to see if the cd sound was muted but it's not.

First check to see whether you can do it as root, if you can then you have permission problems.
You might be able to fix it by adding yourself as part of the audio group in "/etc/group". You must also make sure the "/dev/audio" device has audio as group.
if that is not the problem then you can run 'kscd' under a terminal and see if it spits out any problem messages.
If none of this works you propably have a hardware setup problem. You would have to find out how to set up whichever sound module you have to use, your best bet would be to throw out a search on the internet for that specific soundcard and hope that someone else had that card and figured out how to get it going.

Good luck.

I have a similar problem:
I have two cdrom drives (one IDE DVD and one IDE burner) and only the DVD will play audio CDs. I think this is because Kscd tries to play /dev/cdrom and this is the DVD, whereas my burner is /dev/scd0. I haven't found a way to avoid this (Kscd's options do not appear to allow you to change this, even as root) but if someone does...

Thymox, on my version of Kscd, when I click on the button that has the silhouette of a hammer and a screwdriver, I get the configuration program. When I click on the ' Kscd options ' tab, there is text box that has the line ' /dev/cdrom ' in it. It looks like it could be edited to point somewhere else. I hope this helps.