iMac 233 rev B - sound working then gone :(

[bluesky]

Greetings!
I installed YDL 5.0,2 on an iMac 233 rev B ( with G4 aftermarket update card ) everything work fine except for sound. Here's the strange rub:
during the initial account set up right after clean install the sound test first failed. I moved the slider around a little, tried the sound again and it worked! When I got the XMMS (and the mp3c decoder for it) player played the .pls files just fine.

On a subsequent login, the sound stopped working. I can remember exactly what I've done between those two points in time except for installing some more packages from additional repositories. ( KDE environment, other odds and ends )

Is there any surefire fix for someting like that?
Thank you in advance.

[bluesky]

... solved it. The hard way, sort of. I decided to reinstall the whole thing and pay attention this time to what's going on. So, all went well, sound card got detected. Added 3 additional repositories and installed only amarok ( which by the way is great! Maybe iTunes will catch up to it one day? ) and the additional 'notfree' package for it. And there was radio playing!!

Then a strange thing happened. I logged out - logged in as root, installed some stuff, logged out as root, logged in as a reg. user and the sound was gone.

So, went to the sound card detection panel, moved the slider ( although I'm not sure if moving the slider did the trick or just going to the control panel ) and the sound was back.

Seems like YDL looses track of the sound card from time to time. Is there a way to fix it?