sound part two

I forgot -- in Gnome, if you start chromium (an arcade game) the sound
doesn't work.  Why?

It doesn't work because it couldn't access the sound device.  Why?

Because the little sound that gnome makes when it launches any app meant
that the device wasn't available when Chromium tried to initialise.

Gnome won't let me choose which OS to reboot into, nor to run an app as
root from the "start --> run" menu.  KDE is ugly.

Any recommendations?  gentoo as a distro was next on my list o check
out, to it's good to hear so much praise.

Oh yes, netconf is in the "start" menu.  I get a hand that says "you
must be root to access linuxconf", but everything else gives me a
password prompt. I guess this is Mandrake specific.

Cheers!