Remastering- No Sound / No Mixer WTF!

Hello All.
Having lovingly remastered with great success kernel2.6.9 only (Knoppix3.7) iso with all the goodies (J2RE1.5, MPlayer+codecs,en-gb FireFox,Flash,RealPlayer10 .....) I've just learned from source (i.e. orig. Knoppix iso) that Alsa sound was NEVER GOING TO WORK>>> la la la la laugh :cry: (buries head..)

That's right Knoppix kernel is 'stuffed' as my original iso is the same. BTW I did run testcd. It was fine.
I would love to share my efforts with anyone IF ONLY I could nail these niggles. Hell, even locales (en-GB,US) work fine..
I didn't use chroot as it just messes about too much when upgrading. I used a Knoppix style HDD install for my remastering enviroment to keep as much LiveCD script compatability as possible when testing and configuring.

This much I know, I can load sound manually (Trident, in my case) using modprobe (AFAIR..) and my sound and mixer both work. So what's up with hotplug/kernel/modules???

Is there anyway to reconfigure the kernel to work correctly??

Much appreciated
:cry: :x :o :D