Sound in Quake3 but not other programs
 

I am running FC2 with Kde 3.2, and a sound card which is being detected as a C-media PCI CMI8738. I am unable to get any sound to work from within KDE (havent tried directly from the console yet, and am unfortunately unable to because I am at work right now. I have tried MPlayer, kdemultimedia, XMMS and various other programs that *should* be producing sound. I have looked into the issue about Alsa being muted by default-- I turned off all muting, and am still unable to play sounds. I looked into turning off the KDE sound manager and kartsd, which also does not seem to help, and turning the volumes on kmix up also. However, when I launch quake3, the sound seems to work fine. Quake3's launch dialog also notes that "system sound is muted" when it boots, which is interesting because this should not be the case, and is not what the alsamixer or kmix reports. I have tried launching alsamixer, and toggling the mute with the 'M' key on the master volume, but I dont seem to be able to toggle mute. However, i am able to do this with all of the other volumes--pcm, 3d control, synth, etc. I am out of ideas, and would deeply appreciate any suggestions/tips/fixes. Thanks in advance.