The alsasound script that needs to be added to the "boot" runlevel locks my system at startup. Everything just freezes when it tries to initialize sound. A solve seems to be just adding the ALSA modules to modules.autoload but I don't think OSS support works then. My soundchip is the VIA-8233 South bridge.
Carl, please read the comments for bug 6985 and see if you can find something useful. I think that this is a misconfiguration issue, but I can't quite put my finger on it. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6985 ***