First of all, sound works with everything else. I have every alsa package installed except for the source and debug. This is on 11.1 on both my desktop and laptop, and was not an issue with 11.0.
My user is part of the audio group. flash, libflashsupport and pullin-flash-player are all installed.
If I reinstall those, it works, sometimes. But after I boot up, sound no longer works.
Is there a way to fix this?
addendum:
Oddly, or perhaps not that oddly, even though sound works trying to play a test sound through YAST fails.
I have no addons installed in Firefox.
Installing every alsa package is not the Linux way. Rather installing what is provided in the packaged set, and then ONLY if necessary adding extra packages is the way to do things. If adding an extra package does not work, then it should be removed. Adding many extra packages IMHO only adds bloat and possible can cause unpredicted effects.
When you boot, and your sound no longer works, what happens when you type:su -c 'rcalsasound restart’enter root password when prompted and test your audio. You may need to restart your mixer before testing your sound.
When testing for basic sound functionality I recommend you copy and paste the following into a gnome-terminal or kde konsole: speaker-test -c2 -l5 -twavand you should hear a ladies voice saying ‘FRONT LEFT’, ‘FRONT RIGHT’ 5 times. You can also try that with root permissions. When testing for basic audio functionality, I recommend you move master and PCM volume up to 95%. You can back off the volume to avoid distortion to a lower level once your sound is functional.
Installing every alsa package is not the Linux way
It seems to be the OpenSuse way since the defaults aren’t enough.
Hang on, let me reboot and see what happens.
OK, back.
Rebooted, the first thing I did was test sound, unsurprisingly it works, but not with flash.
Then I restarted alsa, and that did work!
So how do I force alsa to reboot each time I start up?
alsa automatically starts each time you boot. But its possible you have an NDIS wrapper (for wireless) which is interfering with the alsa load, or possible some ACPI function loading at the time interfering with the alsa load (wild speculation on my part) requiring alsa to be restarted upon boot.
To have alsa restarted upon boot, add the following line to the end of the file /etc/init.d/boot.local :
rcalsasound restart
Alright thank you I will do that.
Nope, no ndiswrapper. My desktop has no wireless and my laptop uses the ath9k drivers in the kernel.
Odd that this problem exists on two totally different systems with 11.1 installed differently(11.1 live disk for laptop and DVD with upgrade option on desktop).
Oh well, just another sign that it might be time to search elsewhere for a good linux distro, opensuse seems to be on a downward spiral. That is a shame, I used 9, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3(other than zypper, this might be the high point), 11.0(not bad, it just lags waaay behind the curve for many, many packages in its official repos, including alsa, kernel, and rails), and now 11.1, where the wheels are falling off. It is finally offering more up to date packages, but there are so many little problems that didn’t exist for 11.0. Perhaps 11.2 will improve 11.1, but the fact that they are going to drop support for KDE 3.5 in favor of the ugly and bloated 4.x isn’t winning me over for the future. KDE 4 offers nothing of value in exchange for the bloat and bugs.
Off topic rant I know, but I do feel better. 
Thanks again for your help.
Wow, that was scary.
I edited the file, actually it was empty aside from some commented out notes, and rebooted. That completely destroyed all sound.
I removed it and rebooted yet again, and now sound works except for flash. Tried to rcalsasound restart on the cl and now flash is even worse. It just fast forwards through the audio. :’(
I killed firefox and restarted it and now it is fine. Maybe if I completely remove firefox including all the stuff in ./mozilla/firefox folder and reinstall will fix the issue?
Its more likely some app has seized your audio and only lets it go when you restart alsa.