strange that, when i used 2.4 on my laptop and recompiled i never had any probs with sound, poss you could cheat and get the modules from the 2.4 kernel in current and add them to modules dir

but i do have the apm section uncommented in rc.M, so the apm module is already modprobed at boot.
when slackware starts, i can see a message sating "/etc/rc.d/rc.apmd start" and lsmod shows apm is present.

anyway, i'm gonna try a few more times to get ti working.

EDIT:---
i also chose to add /dev/video (or something like that) as part or the kernel compilation, and there were some errors after running make dep that refered to that option. could this have any kind of ties with the alsa problem?

EDIT2:---
my rc.modules and rc.modprobe were wiped clean for some reason after the kernel compile