From the what-worked-for-me file... two tips today. One on getting sound by turning up the volume and another on getting rid of applications that keep coming back after a reboot.

Applications that just won't die
I had a problem in my Fedora Core 4 install where every time KDE started up it would start KNode. Every time KDE shut down something would crash. I got tired of closing KNode and had a bright idea. I guessed that maybe KNode was being started because KDE was trying to restore all the applications that were running in my last session. This would make sense if KNode were running at the end of my last session. I further guessed that KNode was the unknown crashing application at shutdown. I decided to have a look at whether it was still running after I'd closed it at start up.

This showed KNode was indeed still running, so I killed that process. I didn't have a crash next time I shut down and KNode didn't start up again. Of course it's not just KNode, any application could do the same thing. If the application crashes and leaves a zombie process then the KDE session manager must be guessing that it should be restarted when the user's next session is started.

No Sound with my Game Theatre XP
My sound card was detected (correctly enough) by Fedora Core 4 as a Cirrus Logic CS4294 chip. It's the old Hercules card that has an external control box. Anyhow, it was detected but I got no sound from KDE in the Control Center, no sound when playing movies, etc. I didn't care enough to fix it until just now. I knew that the sound card worked when I booted with my old Knoppix 3.4 CD, so I tried booting with that disc. It started up, I ran XMMS and played some music with no issues. So I checked the driver settings that XMMS was using: Open Sound System (OSS). Great. Reboot into FC4 and try OSS. Nothing.

I found this answer via a quick Google search. I ran alsamixer, a console application, and turned up the volume on all the channels (cursor keys - left & right to choose the channel, up to turn it up). I had to go do it again once I read the bit about unmuting with the 'M' key. I also noticed that there are more channels than fit on the screen if I kept going to the right. I had a movie playing while I ran alsamixer and sure enough, by the time I got to the last channel I heard sound. Unbelievable. There must be some control equivalent to this for KDE, but I saw nothing in the Multimedia section of the Control Center. That's just plain goofy.