I'm certainly no ALSA expert, but yup, sounds very likely that your ALSA problems are due to having the emu10k1 support built right into the kernel (which I don't really see the reason for). I say that a good rule of thumb is that when compiling a kernel, compile as much as possible as modules. So, seems like you're up for a recompilation.
I don't understand what you mean by asking if ALSA will use emu10k1 only if it exists as a module, since ALSA doesn't use emu10k1 at all. ALSAs corresponding driver would be snd-emu10k1, which of course is a module since ALSA is not a kernel feature. Unless you're using 2.6.x, that is...which I'm guessing you're not. Perhaps you should consider stating your Slackware/kernel version?
But, as I said, I'm no ALSA expert, so don't kill me if I'm wrong.
