Alsa constantly muted and cannot unmute

Hi all, I've been trying to resolve an alsa problem that i've been having for a couple of days now. my machine is a nw8000 laptop with with a special mute button on the front. For some reason all alsa sound is muted. When i use alsamixer nothing is muted !! and using aumix i unmuted Master and PCM. Tried downgrading alsa back to alsa-0.9.6-96 and removed kamix ! and some other alsa tools. Also removed the card using yast. After a reboot i used alsaconf to get it up and running again ! and it worked. No muting. After another reboot it muted again ?? I have no idea as to what might be wrong. Am using a intel8x0 driver ! probably just an Ac'97 driver thingy ? Any pointers out there ? Regards Lasse