First, let me say THANKS to the many people who have responded with ideas.!! I TRULY thank all of you.. But I stumbled across this myself and think I found a bug. First, the fix. To refresh, I had partial sound, but NO CD sound, and no realplay. I did have .wav and sounds in enlighenment/gnome, but many .wav's I played were distorted. I tried sndconfig with all options, no good. Someone said rmmod sound, I got no sound loaded or something.. Last night someone posted rmmod soundcore.. I tried it and got sound module is in use.. So for the heck of it ( this was all logged in as root btw, I retried sndconfig and got Linus, and tried a CD, wham!.. This was in KDE as root. I then booted into KDE as user, worked fine.. Didn't have time for gnome/enlighenment, hadda goto work. Here's the breaker! After work, booted into gnome/enlightenment, and played a CD.. Worked.. Ahh.. I fixed it.. Well then I broke it. GMIX. The current version of GMIX that comes with Mandrake 6.0. I opened it and moved the CD volume and got a "pop" then silence. ( My gut feeling all along was gnome broke it since from what I *remember* when I first installed Mandrake 6.0 I was a KDE user and had never played with gnome but was curious about it and *think* I remember CD working, but not sure.) So,, did the same as above and sound is back.. Opened KMIX from gnome and all is well. Needless to say, I have now removed GMIX from the system! Hope any Mandrake people reading this can hopefully verify! Thanks again. Alan -- =============================================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) Coming to you with Linux-Mandrake 6.0