Alsa plays sounds, but it studders through them badly. The short bell used by Gaim took forever to play. It seemed that each tiny chunk of the sound was being repeated many times before the next chunk was gotten to. In spite of this, though, Alsa does manage to mix sound just fine (fine being that multiple horribly studdering sounds come out all at once). The results are the same when I play wav's using aplay as they are from Gaim. XMMS just locks up, sometimes after making some sound (I have it set to use its alsa output plugin). I'm guessing it is really the same problem (or hoping...I'd rather fix two things than one!).
I'm running Debian (Sarge), with the 2.4.27 kernel. I used the compiled modules in Debian's repository, since they were there for my kernel version and architecture and I haven't recompiled this kernel myself. Is there maybe something wrong with those modules?

Here is my /etc/asound.conf:
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "swmixer"
}

pcm.swmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1234
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
}

And here is the output of "uname -a", in case it matters: Linux cheese 2.4.27-1-386 #1 Fri Sep 3 06:24:46 UTC 2004 i686 GNU/Linux

Thanks for any help.