Ok, I've seen lots of posts on the aureal sound card problem(s) and I can't seem to get rusults walking the paths of others. My question concerns how I go about troubleshooting this problem. Here are the particulars.

I'm running suse 9.1 pro with a Turtle Beach MontegoII sound card that has aureal vortex2 chipset. The sound card suddenly stops working at seemingly random times. When it does work, it plays distorted sound and/or plays sound at an increased rate; i.e. like alvin and the chipmonks. While it does amuse me to hear Jonny Cash sound like he just huffed 13 helium balloons, I'd like to get this working properly.

I've noticed that after rebooting, the sound card shows up as having different drivers. After invoking suse plugger, the driver shows au8820 one time and au8830 another.

I've removed the sound card throught suse plugger and reconfigured it with alsaconf, which sometimes works, then it goes back to its old tricks.

How can i discover the root of this problem and fix it?