Having emerged (upgraded to) version 0.9.3 of alsa-driver, alsa-lib, alsa-utils and alsa-tools I got two or three warning messsages on bootup which did not appear on dmesg. Also, when I tried to open kdevelop it complained about not being able to find the following file which was not at its specified location. /usr/X11R6/lib/libaudio.so.2 So I made the following symlink. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 May 4 18:49 /usr/X11R6/lib/libaudio.so.2 -> /usr/lib/libaudiofile.so.0.0.2 Having made the symlink kdevelop opened up as normal and boot warnings when starting alsa no longer occured. I'm not sure if I have symlinked the correct file but it seems that there is some sort of modification required. I'll leave it in your capable hands. Many thanks.
Reason - Outdated bug with outdated version of alsa with no activity for long.