Ah yes, forums, as my friend put it when I was talking to him last night "The place you go when you're desperate."
 
I had a feeling problems would arise during that last update, but didn't expect anything like this. First X broke, complaining of the lack of a core pointer. after much desperation I fixed that problem. Everything seemed to work fine and dandy, until I realised I was without sound. Somewhere amidst the desperation the idea came upon me to try another dist upgrade later that day, seeing if there were a fix to the "problem". I had forgotten completely that unlike synaptic, apt-get didn't have a preference for preferring packages from testing.... and so my computer became Sid. (oh my)
 
Anyway, I've tried the garden variety of things to do to fix sound (the only real problem I'm having). Yes, the volume is on, the mixer is set, I've installed the typical alsa packages and configured my programs to use the alsa sink. I've run alsaconfig and the like. I tried the minihowto at the alsa site for good measure, and lsmod even reports taht the driver to my card is loaded(snd-intel8x0), and yet, no sound for me It seems like programs are pretending to have sound, but they don't. If I go into a volume manager or whatnot that shows me what's being outputted, and then do things that would make sound, it shows activity, and yet, silence. Anybody here have any ideas by chance?