Running Slack 10.1 w the 2.6.11 kernel. Like everyone else with on board AC97 sound, I can't get it to work. I been playing around with all kinds of options.
Anyways, I recompiled my kernel so that sound support was a module instead of built in to the kernel. Except now when my kernel boots it still says loading AlSA kernel suport, and neither soundcore modules nor the ALASA modules are being loaded. None of the other modules were affected. I made sure that I copied over the new image, linked the system map and config file etc etc..

I've recompile my kernel probably 6 times in the last week for optimization and this is the first problem I have had.

Have you tried compiling with soundcore static and alsa as modules, then running alsaconf?
good luck.