Hi all,

I have a very strange problem.  Last night I updated all my packages and rebooted.  On boot, alsasound started (boot runlevel), but while trying to restore mixer levels, it hung.  I had to boot to a livecd and remove alsasound from boot to even start my system.  I tried removing the old state file (in case the format changed and it was breaking because of that), but it wouldn't start without it.
glamdring ~ # /etc/init.d/alsasound start
 * One of the files in /etc/{conf.d,init.d} or /etc/rc.conf
 * has a modification time in the future!
 * Loading ALSA modules ...      [ ok ]
 * Restoring Mixer Levels ...
 * No mixer config in /var/lib/alsa/asound.state, you have to unmute your card!   [ ok ]
glamdring ~ # cd /var/lib/alsa/
glamdring alsa # l
total 9
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  152 May 17 16:26 ./
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root  568 May 17 03:17 ../
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    0 May 17 16:26 .keep_media-sound_alsa-utils-0.9
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 8073 May 17 12:50 asound.state.old
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  144 May 17 12:50 oss/
glamdring alsa # mv asound.state.old asound.state    
glamdring alsa # cd
glamdring ~ # /etc/init.d/alsasound zap
 * Manually resetting alsasound to stopped state.
glamdring ~ # /etc/init.d/alsasound start
 * Loading ALSA modules ...      [ ok ]
 * Restoring Mixer Levels ...
Which is where it hangs.  Other alsa programs like alsaconf and alsamixer hang on startup, along with programs that attempt to use ALSA to output sound.  I've tried reinstalling ALSA, I've tried revdep-rebuild, I've done modules-rebuild, and I'm at my wit's end.  None of it seems to make sense, and Gnome isn't very happy about not having a sound output, so half of my GUI is missing.  If anyone has some idea why this could be happening to me, please let me know.

Eric