I have a soundcard on my desktop system that used to be detected fine by the old sndconfig, in the 2.2 kernel era - after 2.4, and sndconfig >.6, it doesn't detect it properly for some reason, and takes a long time. But now that i know what the card is, it can be configured other ways. These days, i compile my own kernel, simply checking to include the cs4232 driver and my sound works with no problem at boot time.
Do you know what kind of card you have? If not, try lspci and see what looks like sound hardware, and try to determine which kernel module is the driver for that card. Then, try modprobe <driver>. I would use modprobe cs4232, for instance. My laptop has a weird card and I have to use the generic sb driver.