>I'll give it a try. But I learned during the original problem I 
>had with sound,
>root uses a completely different sound scheme than normal users in 
>TDE. root
>makes use of alsa-raw which bypasses a bulk of the user sound 
>config, so it may
>work fine and still not be a permission issue.

If true then file a bug report. There should be no reason why root 
should use arts differently than non-root users.

>Since this is virtualbox, I'll just create users doug, sally, ben 
>and jerry and have totally different profiles :)

At this point I say stop and test with real hardware. Virtual 
machines work great for many things, but your particular problem 
needs to be resolved with real hardware. Get a second machine, 
create a second partition. I use all of the above for testing.

Darrell