Well, here goes.

After finding that Alsa has a stable release out, and it's NOT available for 
Mandrake, I've decided it's time to switch the main workstation to SuSE.

Of course, this is just in time to discover that there's something wrong with 
the address book import feature in KMail for SuSE, but I think I'd rather be 
fixing that than be fixing the completely hosed sound system on Manrdake.

Wish me luck!