[B0rsuk]

I use (K)Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 and I have no problem with sound. I use ALSA.

I have to admit, though, that sound effects are slightly laggy , a fraction of a second or something. That is, there's a very short interval between clicking a menu button and hearing click sound.
There was no interval for me in Dominions2, because I used OSS back then. But OSS has poor mixing on ac97 so I switched to ALSA.

The intervals I'm speaking about are typical for 'OSS programs' emulated with ALSA. What's curious, however, is that I typically have to manually do the emulation with a command 'aoss programname'.

WHat's your distro and do you have alsa-oss package installed ?

Oh, one last thing. I know a dirty trick to temporarily switch back to oss. It works in Kubuntu 6.06 at least.
killall artsd
run a program
try to play a sound outside the game and artsd returns.
(as I understand, artsd is some kind of KDE sound thingy)

That's all I can say. My Geforce2 MX is suffering from old age afflictions and it simply freezes if I don't use vesa driver. I can't run Dom3demo until I get another card.