Thanks for the suggestions. More googling had actually revealed a known problem with KDE 3.2.2, namely that sometimes one has to disable the kmix setting "restore playing level at startup". That did the trick for me, although i have no idea what triggered the problem with no KDE update in ages. And yes Hal, I am member of the "audio" group as you anxiously aked (just kidding, i know it can get hard to post at times). Cheers.