New sound problems

Now that I've gotten the sound to the point where aplay can play it, I've found that I can't get any sound out of the system notifications. Clicking on the "play" button in the controls for that within kcontrol produces nothing. I've looked around for places where the sound might be deactivated, but everywhere I've looked it's not deactivated. Any ideas? And another problem: There's a little icon for KAmixer on my taskbar. I can click on it and bring up a box with a slider. But if I left-click on the box with the slider, the box disappears! Does anyone else have that behavior? Paul Abrahams