If I invoke alasconf / alasmixer, I can get my sound card to work. I have no idea as to the underlying cause though, as it claims to unload and then reload sound support.

While I have someone's attention, can anyone shed further light on the unionrw situation with 4.0.2?
I tried to use disk space to replace or augment my available memory, but unionrw=/mnt/sda1/holdstuff didn't help my cause.