I just made the move from Slack 11 to Debian etch/lenny on my Thinkpad. I used the exact same kernel .config and made my custom kernel. Everything was detected perfectly as normal. SDL, alsa, openal, alsa-utils, all that jazz was installed but for the life of me my sound would not work. alsamixer settings fine (#1 cause of sound problems? hehe). After fidgeting for way too long I did a /etc/init.d/alsa-utils reset which magically fixed the problem. However, after a reboot I have to do the same reset for the sound to work. What gives? Any ideas could prove useful.

I have intel8x0 audio on my Thinkpad T43 if your wondering and it is currently compiled as a module.

Check to make sure that your /etc/modprobe.d/sound is correct similar to mine below.

Of course putting your module in place of mine if this does not work and you need to keep using the reset command then put that near the bottom of the /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh file to have it executed every boot.