Continued Problems with Sound

Why do I have to delete the configured sound carads every time I log in to 
SuSE 8.2 Professional and reconfigure them to get anything to work other than 
pcm from the general system.  As soon as I reconfigure the sound, everything 
works....until I log out.  I have seen other people reporting this, but can't 
recall a fix at the moment.

Why doesn't SuSE fix this?  It is a real agravation.  And of course, the 
official response from SuSE is that they do not provide installation support 
for sound (They did not respond that way when I bought earlier versions of 
SuSE...they provided excellent assistance.) I could understand that approach 
if the things being affected were something unusual, but you can't even get 
the alsamixer to run until you delete and reinstall the sound cards.

Does anyone have a solution? (You can't tell I'm frustrated with this can 
you?)

Thomas