Ok, so heres the deal.

I had a power outage the other day, and ever since then things have been not quite right in my linux world. Mostly with permissions. The most noticeable issue is the audio. There is none. My first thought was that a module failed to load, so I checked, and everything appears as it should. So I ran a trace on alsamixer, because it was saying no devices found, figured out that I had a permission problem on
I also ran Mplayer on a video, and it comes back with:
I checked permissions on these files, and they state:
Which looks correct to me. So I looked to ensure that I am in the audio group. Here is where it gets wierd. My user was not in any of the groups it had been in before (disk, audio, cdrom, etc, etc). So I added it back into the groups, and checked /etc/group to confirm that the changes had been made, and they HADN'T.

Does anyone know how often the group file is updated? Is it updated immediately after modification of group info?

I tried backing up my group file and modifying it manually, and that hasnt fixed the problem.

Also, another wierd thing to note is that in my gkrellm, all of my sensors disappeared, which was setup using a modified amd sensor to work right with my quad-core, but thats a different story. But all of this happened all at once, which I believe that it is all related.

Any ideas on where I should go now?

Thanks

what is the result of running on a console?
cheers,
jdk

But that is only because i manually edited it. Before it was just root. I changed my group using kusers, and even tried setting my primary group as audio, and it still didnt change in the group file.

Thanks,

But now myuser is in the audio group and that is correctly in the group file, yes? Do you still have permission problems?
jdk

After a restart that seemed to fix the problem. So all in all, what I had to do was modify the group file by hand, and restart. That has to be the first time that restarting fixed something in linux!

Thanks