Okay, I should have made a bigger fuss about it before, but from waay back in the old days (on a Mac, when I could get sound), I always muted it. I got used to the silence, so when the new update brought the ALSA drivers, I was pretty shocked to hear that first .ogg ..especially since I've never even gotten ALSA to work on my i845 chipset, and so still use OSS

..I remember the hint a while back, about "echo "vendetta 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss" ..I never had a /card0 in my /proc/asound, hmm....

anyhow, the new default drivers work like a charm :D

It may still be using the OSS drivers, except it doesn't attempt to use mmap() now, which your chipset may not have supported. Either way, glad it works.