As the topic says, unfortunately I can't be any more specific than that. I switched from KDE to Enlightenment, and suddenly my soundcard doesn't work with anything. I emerged esound, and added esd to autostart, but I cannot seem to get any program to use the new sound daemon.

I just have no idea how sound works in linux, it's just magically always worked. Can someone suggest something?

Here is the output of lspci, if that will help diagnose something.
stevex40 steve # lspci | grep Audio
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)