I found this odd...

Sometimes, and only sometimes, when I turn of on my laptop and log in, my sound system fails to function. No tune is played at startup, xine can't initialize sound drivers, etc. Then if I restart my system everything usually works fine.

Why is this? Does Linux (SUSE 10.1) have a mind of its own and decide when it should work properly, and when it should not? My understanding is that every startup should be the same, as there are no variables in the mix. Maybe I'm wrong. Why does this problem arise sometimes and not all the time, and how can I prevent it from ever occuring?

I had this problem on my Fedora desktop. Went away at some point during the massive upgrades so I never paid attention to it... Is everything upgraded? New alsa, bios, kernel? Anything strange showing up in the logs? Dmesg?