I've been having sound problems for months and have tried dozens of fixes. At least now I always find the mute set as default. When I correct it, the machine never makes any sounds EXCEPT when I turn it off. I also get an error message that says "KDE detected one or more internal sound devices were removed. Do you want KDE to permanently forget about these devices?" I always say no.I also can't get Amarok to run CDs. After going through a lot of trouble I can find there's one there, but Amarok always says it's empty and won't run it. Also, when I put a CD in, it never is seen by the desktop.Also, when I try to open Kmix, the little icon bounces, then goes away. Guess that'll do for starters.

Which distribution do you use?

For KMix, try looking in the system tray ( bottom right hand corner by default ) and see if a speaker icon is present there. Clicking that should bring up a small menu, with a slider and one button labelled "Mixer" click this button to open the main KMix window.

For audio not playing correctly, what backend is listed at the top in System Settings > Multimedia > Backends? It should be either "Xine" or "GStreamer"

Sorry, I'm still pretty new to Kubuntu. Thought I had it down, then upgraded to 9.04, then 9.10, and a lot has changed. I presume I do something in terminal mode to find distro. I do have the speaker icon in the tool bar, but each time I start up it's muted again.In the "configure Kmix" window everything is checked: dock in system tray, enable system tray volume control, and restore volumes on login. Re: backends, it says Phonon Xine.

Kubuntu is your distribution in this case. openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. are all Distributions.

Can you make sure that Pulseaudio is not installed?