cannot use custom installed alsa driver in SuSE 10
 

I installed SuSE 10 and am paying dearly for doing so. It did not have a driver for the sound card, nor did Alsa.

The motherboard manufacturer gave me a link to an installer which duly installed an alsa driver for the soundcard and ran alsaconf. After running the KDE sound config tool (as far as it worked), I got sound a couple of times but it did not last and now I cannot get it back.

The bones of this sad saga (which has caused me to review my rejection of Mandriva 2006) are:

1. Yast control centre now lists a soundcard. When I press the "edit" button, the module closes.
2. The KDE tool will not let me enter or select anything under "Select the Midi device". When I click on "Apply", it begins a never-ending loop wherein it displays "starting sound system" and shows a progress bar starting, proceeding, finishing and starting again.
3. Each time I've run alsaconf, it tests the sound (whereupon there is no sound), congratulates me and tells me to have fun. All I want at present is sound to use with kalarm.
4. The last straw: when I try to run alsamixer (which I've had running previously), I get the message "snd_ctl_open failed for default. No such device."

I've searched previous threads. They're mostly fairly old (no sign of progress here) and none, that I can see, are on point. Is there, possibly, a SuSE enthusiast with sage advice?