I have been using lenny for a long time. The sound has always worked, until recently.

VLC started acting up. I started getting that bumping noise "duh-duh-duh-duh . . . " and VLC would not exit, I had to do a kill -9. Also, at the same time, I kept losing my network. I had to keep doing ifup and ifdown.

I have tried rebooting, starting and stopping alsa, I have ran alsaconf many times, I have ran alsamixergui, I have reinstalled alsa. Nothing works, I get no sound.

Everything seems to install, and configure, correctly. I get errors when I try to run vlc, or audacious; but I get no sound.

I know everything is hooked up correctly, and I know there are no hardware problems. When I boot into windows, the sound works fine.

Could you post some of the errors you're receiving? Have you restarted X and the machine cleanly to ensure you're not having an issue on this boot only? Are you getting errors in any other applications or only your network and sound?

I can not explain why, but the problem stopped.

I had this problem for quite some time, time passed, I rebooted several times, and the problem stopped. I wish I had an explanation.