sound not working in breezy (SB audigy SE)

[H.S.]

Hi,

I am helping a friend of mine to migrate from Windows to Linux. He has
installed Ubuntu breezy recently and I help him admin the computer remotely.

Initially, his sound was not working and he got a new sound card, SB
Audigy SE. However, replacing that sound card also caused problems. It
worked after some tinkering and then stopped working completely.
Alsamixer shows a setting called SPDIF which if muted causes a hissing
noise on the speaker. Lspci says it sees:
0000:00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy LS

He had disabled the onboard sound card right after rebooting with the
new card. The sound works in Windows.

I see that various sound modules are listed, e.g.:
snd_ca0106             27172  0
snd_ac97_codec         72188  1 snd_ca0106
snd_pcm                78344  2 snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec
snd                    48644  8
snd_mpu401,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer
snd_page_alloc         10120  2 snd_ca0106,snd_pcm


Then we tried moving /etc/modutils/alsa-base and
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base elsewhere(effectively removing these), and
rebooting (tried alsa-utils restart as well) and this time did not even
get /dev/dsp or /dev/audio.

So, given this sound card, any suggestions how to get it working?

thanks,
->HS