Problems with sound in kde...what's going on?!

[RaceTM]

Hi all,

I have a user account that is used as the main account for a mediacentre PC. This user can play media using vlc, no problem...there is sound, everything is happy. Browser works, with sound. This same user can not launch kmix, and can not play sound with amarok. The kde multimedia control panel (kde 4.3.5) states that the sound device has been uninstalled or is unavailable or something like that, and amarok complains that there is no sound device available. kmix, and amarok work fine for another user. both users are part of the audio group. Tried running alsaconf as root to see if it would give me any helpful information (even though alsamixer works for both users), and it reported that it couldn't find any devices o_O

I'm sure there is something dumb I'm overlooking, probably permissions on a file somewhere but I can't figure it out :/

I recently did a world update, that's when thigs started breaking. revdep-rebuild has been run, everything is up to date.

[RaceTM]

So I think this is sort of resolved - not sure exactly what fixed it. I was trying a bunch of different things, nothing seemed to make any difference. I noticed that the user that has sound working was part of the plugdev group, the user fr whom sound was broken was not. So I added the latter user to this group, logged out, logged back in, nothing changed. I then rebooted, and sound magically works now (and the device is seen in the kde control panel). kmixer still refuses to start for the one user though, I guess I will try re-installing and see what happens.