** Reply to message from Clayton
This is NOT a volume setting problem that we are having. This is some other wonky issue. Maybe a bug in artsd or alsa? I don't know. What I do know is - It's not a volume setting thing. - It will mysteriously start working at some point (almost everyone who's reported this problem on the various SuSE groups has had it start working again, but without any indication why). - Nothing you change in the settings seems to have any affect on the problem... including playing with the sound settings in YAST and in Kcontrol.
My system is once again without sound. It was working.. then it stopped. I tinkered for hours trying to find out what's wrong... nothing I did made any difference. They after one of many many reboots it started working. I worked on other things for a while and managed to screw up my kernel modules so much (tinkering and playing with recompiles just to see what 9.3 can do) that I decided that it was easier to reinstall than to try to back out my changes. After the reinstall... no sound again. Nothing I've done since will get it working again either.
Seriously annoying.
Well I finally got my sound working, albeit in a bit of a round-about manner. I was trying to use the on-board sound chip on my pooter. Worked fine in 9.2 but no sound with 9.3. So I installed a spare sound card I had on the shelf (an old Aureal Vortex). Configured the sound card and pressed the volume test button - voila! Sound. However.... When I tried to play a CD there was no sound, and when I looked at the configuration for the sound card all the levels were back to "0." Very mysterious. I looked at the Yast configuration and it seemed to be trying to default back to the on-board chip. So I deleted the driver for the on-board chip, reconfigured the sound card making sure that the volume settings including the one for CD were set to maxiumum, applied, saved, and tried the CD again. This time I had sound! ;o) So I still don't know why the on-board chip was not putting out sound, but at least with the spare sound card it's now working. I'm wondering if somehow I had overlooked some setting for the on-board chip, or had neglected to click "apply"? I don't think I overlooked anything but ....?? ;o) Anyway, all is well here now. Thanks, everyone. Gil