I've been finding that every now and then on running kmix or gnome-volume-control or more or less any gui mixer applet, I lock up hard and have to pull the plug. I'm using 2.6.7 kernel with alsa and I've noticed since disabling aRts and upgrading from the 2.4 kernel to the 2.6 kernel that I have far less problems but I still am every few weeks or perhaps once a month having this weird problem. Does anyone have any pointers on what I might be able to do to troubleshoot this? Even a journalling filesystem doesn't seem to be able to handle too many of these lockups before I need to reimage from a backup or reinstall - the last time I managed to hose my bootloader. Ouch.

Thank you for any suggestions you might have.

Ok, I ended up finding the solution so I'll throw this one out there in case anyone ever has the same problem and looks for it on google.

I ended up rebuilding my kernel removing support for alsa, and using oss instead. Since then I have had no problems at all to do with sound, and my machine is running flawlessly. I imagine this is a fault to do with my ancient sound card (neomagic 256zx) and not anything actually to do with alsa itself. Since Slackware is designed to use alsa, I had to throw together a quick 'rc.oss' script to replace 'rc.alsa' and load the sound modules on startup. You can add an entry calling your script in rc.M to have it run on startup.