Sorry Alien, that seems not to be it, although it appears to be a similar problem. I'm running Xfce (in Slackware), and I'm not sure that artsd is started by default...top and ps show nothing called artsd. But anyway, if I run artsd (via command line), try to cat something to /dev/dsp or /dev/audio and is responds a little differently. Before, it took maybe ~10 seconds to get the "input/output error" response, but with artsd running, it takes a much shorter time, but gets the same error. But in any case, I don't think artsd is even being started. Is there another sound daemon, maybe used by slack or Xfce, that I could try killing? Also, I've tried each device availible in XMMS in turn; ALSA, aRts, OSS, etc. All work :-(

and yeah I've tried to insert it manually with modprobe but that seems not to work either.