esound did not work when I compiled it with alsa support(USE alsa was set). A quick search on groups.google.com revealed that esound can be reall unhappy when compiled with alsa support. I compiled esound without alsa support (it will use alsa's oss emulation instead.) and it worked like a charm.
hmm .. worked much better here with alsa-support (With a CMI soundcard).
Mine was onboard audio - via686a
hmm .. I'm marking this bug as WORKSFORME. if you could mail gentoo-dev about the issue (include the issue-number) we might get reports from others as well.