When you are rebooting from Windows to Linux is it a warm reboot or a cold, hard one?
I was just doing the warm boot thing. At your suggestion I tried a real cold reboot... machine off and unplugged for a while. Made no difference to the sound problem James' suggestions about flashing or writing to nram started me on the next step in this... I booted back to Windows, removed all the sound drivers (SiS7012 and AC'97) and reinstalled them paying close attention to what was going on... nothing too odd... had to reboot Windows a few times to get the drivers removed and reinstalled. Poked about in Windows and the sound was working fine there just like it was before I removed the drivers. Booted back to Linux. Now here is where things go weird. Sound works in Linux now. Huh???? Everything is back to where it was before. I made no changes at all on the Linux side after the initial experimenting with killing artsd etc. Just several reboots... This makes very little sense to me... I can guess that maybe it has to do with some state the Windows drivers place the SiS chipset into that affects how it works in Linux... dunno. I rarely boot to Windows... except to play games once in a while... think i'll leave things alone for now... cross my fingers and hope it keeps working. Weird.... ...