Well, I have an Audigy, and its been working fine for over a year. I have drivers compiled into my 2.6.5-r1 kernel (gentoo-dev-sources), and only recompiled after it started playing up. What happened was I was in gnome, and started a new gdm session on display 8 (with gnome still running on display 7). I started a kde session, and after it hung on initialising system devices, the music I was playing with rhythmbox just cut out.

Kinda confused, I logged out of kde, and noting I could do in gnome (checked volume applet and all) brought back my sound. I was kinda desperate so I dropped back to virtual console 1 and tried aplay on half the wavs in /usr/share/sounds, nothing worked.

Now I restarted alsa (/etc/init.d/alsasound restart) and hoped sound would come back (checked everything with alsamixer, soundcard shows up fine but still no sound form speakers), but still nothing. After recompiling drivers both as modules and builtin to the kernel, and checking afteer each recompile, I uninstalled alsa-libs and alsa-utils (alsa-driver is compiled into kernel), deleted /etc/asound.state and installed my soundcard again by hand with builtin kernel drivers. Again alsa detected it, and after unmuting Master and PCM (set both to 100), I tried aplay on stuff in my /usr/share/sounds dir. Again no luck, I'm really missing my ogg collection...

I really hope I missed something simple, but I got a feeling that kde borked my soundcard, can somebody help please???

I'm going to ask this question in the gentoo forums, but I don't think teh problem lies with gentoo...