sound weirdness in Redhat 8 - no sound, touch - voila; rinse, repeat

Greetings all,

I've been using Redhat Linux for a while - almost four years now.  Until 
recently I was stuck on the 6.2 release w/ most of its upgrades foregoing 
the 7.x ones.

Now, I'm running 8.0 on a machine built from spares and a few extras (PIII 
1.4, 1GB RAM, etc).  I'm using a Soundblaster 16 card (loads the es1371 
module).

I've been slowly getting all of the services configured to my liking, but 
I'm scratching my head on this one.

When I start up X and then some sound-related app - xmms or the CD player, 
there's no sound.  When I bring up the Volume control app and beginning 
playing with  the drawbars - either the main one, pcm, or CD I have sound 
and things work normally.

When I shutdown and reboot, the same thing occurs - no sound, diddling w/ 
Volume Control brings it back.

Never had this problem w/ 6.2

Any ideas on what I should touch/work on as far as configurations?

Much thanks!

Max Pyziur
[email protected]

p.s. what does
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L 
>/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 
2>&1 || :

in /etc/modules.conf do?