Sound Issues in Fresh Hoary Install

[Kent Frazier]

Hello list.

I recently reinstalled Hoary fresh from Array 2 after my previous
install gave up the ghost (died).  Everything went pretty well, and
all seemed to be working fine, except a few problems with the sound. 
When I first booted in, there was no sound.  After messing around with
alsamixer and the gnome mixer applet, I realized that everything was
muted and the volume levels were at the minimum.  OK, I thought, easy
enough to fix.  After unmuting and increasing the volume for master
and PCM, the event sounds all worked fine.  After every reboot,
however, they are again muted and lowered to nothing.  How can I get
it to stop resetting the sound levels?

Second sound issue:  I cannot get totem-xine to play audio.  I tried
it with gxine as well, and neither of them play the sound for movie
files.  The system sounds are working fine.  I tried going back to
totem-gstreamer, but it can't even play the files I want, so that's a
bust.  I haven't tried many other applications to test their sound,
but I went looking around for settings and such and couldn't figure
out how to get the sound working.  Anyone have any idea what's up?

Here's hoping.

Kent