I installed Mandrake 10.1 on my laptop, and all installation went well, everything was configured ok including the sound (Intel AC'97). However, I muted it last night because the noise was kind of loud. When I turned it on this morning, I installed NdisWrapper so my Wireless card would work (and it does now), but after rebooting, ALSA failed because it said it couldn't detect a sound card or something like that, which is absurd because it was just working just fine until I installed NdisWrapper. I look in the MCC, and everything appears to be fine, the speaker icon is still in the taskbar (without the little x). How can I fix it?

There seems to be a bug in the init script which causes a failure message to appear during boot.

I get the same thing though sound works perfectly for me.

What may be happening is that sound is indeed working correctly but that the audio mixer has reverted to it's default muted or "all off" settings.

Try installing auxmix and setting the mixer levels back up.

Then save the settings in it's menu.

Once done go back to the kde control panel and save the "current default" mixer values so you will not need to do this again.