i've read every man page i can on the subject to no avail. can anyone help on this?

i use alsa for my intel 810 sound card... getting the alsa set up for that was hard enough for me since i've only been doing this a few months... now i have to re-set my alsamixer controls every time i boot the computer. i've learned to use alsactl to store and restore my controls, so i can just load my presets up each time, but i still have no sound every time the computer starts. is there a way i can actually set the defaults? thanks in advance.

I recently set up the alsa driver for my system. If you've downloaded the "alsa-driver.tar.gz" then in the "utils" directory of the archive you should find a program called "alsalconf". Run this as root and you should be good to go. Alsaconf will set up the drivers to be loaded at boot time (at least it did so for my system). Good luck.

they do load at boot time. its the volume defaults i need to change.

try setting the volumes as you want them to be using alsamixer,
then using alsactl store to save them. then add the line

alsactl restore

to /etc/rc.d/rc.local, and your volume settings will be restored
during boot.