I got home from work and my girlfriend was having trouble printing. It seems it was taking a long, long time for print jobs to make it to the printer. I ran top to see what was going on and alsamixer was using 99% of the CPU. I killed alsamixer and restarted the X server and alsamixer was at it again. What would cause that?

Are you sure that there wasnt anything using alsa? there could have been a syetem sound that got stuck in loop or something, and your speakers were just off. Another way to cut down on alsa usage is to disable the system sound effects in KDE. you can find that setting in the control panel. if that dosnet fix it, then I am out of suggestions

Are you sure it was alsamixer? It's not meant to be running all the time. You run then you exit and save settings.

Yep, it was alsamixer. This morning it was working fine. It's not even in the process table now. I guess it fixed itself. Computers are weird!

Thanks for the help.

All's well that ends well, I suppose.

I had this problem a while back with My Audigy2 on Redhat9. I compiled and installed Alsa, using those instead of the standard OSS drivers which seem to be quite buggy when dealing with those cards. I also recompiled KDE and all it's dependant libs but that probably was not necessary. Personally I despise arts. It's slow, buggy, unresponsive, and ineffecient. If you are just using xmms to play mp3s and don't use the rest of the audio, you could just disable arts altogether and use xmms's oss driver. Since arts uses /dev/dsp(or whatever), xmms will not be able to use it if arts is using it. If you download and install alsa, and then compile arts, you can configure it with something like --enable-alsa to let it use alsa instead of the standard oss spiel.