i have same card and same laptop probably (hp dv9000). Im sorry i did not see your first post. Yes sound had some issues out of the box but manually recompiling ALSA drivers would have sorted out all of your problems.
Well remember this as one of the first things to try if in the future you should have other sound problems with any machine and card, if the dont get sorted with a mere card configuration in yast.

As to audacity: i had it working in 10.2 even before recompiling the driver. It was actually very very simple, just enough to change the input device, it picked up a wrong default, you will see a list, the default it think was OSS, you should have played with the few options available and try them all, i think choosing hda-intel entry solved all your problem.
Again, just keep this in mind should it happen again in the future with other versions or machines