>I know this sounds stupid, but what happens when you actually try playing something through a media player? In the past, I've occasionally had that error message when logging into KDE/Gnome about not being able to connect to the sound server, yet still had my sound system work fine.
It doesn't work at all in amaroK. Do you have any ideas for a Realtek High Definition Audio driver for Ubuntu? I would rather use apt-get because I'm not in the mood to start searching again for a package.