STRANGE SOUND PROBLEM

[Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas]

I upgraded my laptop to SuSE 8.0 Professional from 7.3 Professional  (the laptop is a Sony Vaio PCG-FX140 with 700 MHz Pentium III  with speedstep and i upgraded it to 512 MB of RAM and 30 GB hard disk, 7.5 of which is the Linux partition).  When I sign into my KDE 3 account, I get (during KDE initialization) a message saying that the resource /dev/dsp is  not available or busy, so the sound server will send the output to null.

Oddly enough, if I log in my  root account (without rebooting) and issue a rcalsasound restart to restart the sound server, sound works like a charm, even better than Windows, but I get back to square one if I reboot!  Now, I know that all paradoxical phenomena are not really paradoxes but they look such because the observer misses a key piece of information. Not being a *nix guru, I have to consult the experts in a board like this.  What does /dev/dsp do, anyway?
At a first glance, the /proc/ files do not reveal anything suspicious, at least not to me.

My naive understanding is that services that get initialized trample upon sound module resources and create a conflict (in fact, I hear a click from the speakers after some services are initialized at startup, well after I see the message about the sound server initialization flashing by). Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

CF
PS. I also upgraded my aging 200 MHz MMX desktop to the same version and I have no problems with sound (SB16 Vibra card) whatsoever.
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