Ok, Kde boots all nicely and starts to play the sound file for startup, then about halfway through the clip, it mutes and while I am in the GUI I have no sound from then on. If I run aumix, everything is muted and turning that up gives me sound only with xmms, as far as i can tell, alothough I though xmms used arts for sound which kde also does (?). Im so confused! Anyways other than xmms I still cant get any sound to work, and the sound system test thing does not work either. Is something turning off the sound on boot, or killing arts? How do I restart arts?

KDE uses it's own mixer settings differently from alsa ones. So you can use KDE's mixer to regulate the sound in kde, or tell it to not load it's settings but use the system defaults (alsa ones). That's done in the control panel, somewhere in the sounds settings (i don't remember now since i don't use kde in a long time).

Arts is kde's sound daemon, it works ok togheter with alsa so don't worry about it, just check the kde settings.

Btw, you can also choose in the control panel not to use arts.