Mandrake 8.0 and soundblaster 16

I have a problem. I made a cute link to app to launch Chromium. I was so pleased with it that I copied it to the desktop of my sons accounts. Well, what I really did was cp ... /home/christopher/Desktop
Of course I did this as root, and of course it copied my link to ../christopher and renamed it Desktop and overwrote the previous file.
That wasn't what I had in mind.

So I used Konqueror as root and copied my (user) desktop to the affected accounts and chown to the user and that seemed to fix the mistake.

However, none of the affected accounts have sound anymore.

root has sound, I have sound, but no one else has sound.

I ran into this before, I completely wrecked an account and rather than try and fix it I used UserDrake to remove it and then re-create it. It had no sound, any account I tried to create with a name that had been used at one point wouldn't have sound, yet a new never used username would have sound.

Somewhere in /home/user/.kde or somewhere there must be some file that controls wherether sound is available or not, but I don't know where that is.

In KDE configuration tool it says sound card is installed and working, but still no sound.

How can I restore sound to these accounts?? And what is the right way to recreate destroyed desktops?

I don'y know why or how, but the accounts now have sound. I don't see how restarting x would have fixed it, and I'm not sure that is what did it, but maybe.
anyway please disregard sorry