Interestingly enough I have the same mobo and sound works just fine. Did you use the 'alsa' cheat when you installed? Of course you could just build the alsa drivers against your kernel source. I would recommend reinstalling kmix or aumix as they are mixers and sndconfig is a tool for configuring the sound card. Of course if it didn't help then perhaps it isn't so necessary.

Dunno if sound works on GAIM at the same time as using XMMS because:

a) I have no friends

or

b) I've never used GAIM.

Of course I could install and use GAIM but then I'd be right back to the no friends problem.