Sound weirdness

[David Barron]

I can't seem to get sound to work at all in Lunar.  Hardware-wise everything is working because the sound works fine when I boot off the Knoppix live cd.  Here's what I've done in Lunar:
Installed alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils.  
Brought up alsamixer to unmute all sound channels and set volume to max.
Used alsactl store to do the obvious.
My user id is in the following groups: audio, users, cdrom, floppy
Installed mp3blaster.  Start it up, load an mp3 file and start it playing.  Mp3blaster runs with no error, but there's NO SOUND!  I've also tried playing a wave file in Gnome Sound Recorder but I get an error about /dev/dsp being busy.  When I exit Xwindows I see that esd has generated some errors:

Audio device open for 44.1Khz, stereo, 16bit failed
Trying 44.1Khz, 8bit stereo.
Audio device open for 44.1Khz, stereo, 8bit failed
Trying 48Khz, 16bit stereo.

I know it's not likely that anyone will be able to say "this is what's wrong" but can anyone make any suggestions where I might start?

Thanks