soundcard stopping?

[Nicholas Holley]

I'm running an up to date version of Freebsd 5.1, and I'm having 
problems with my soundcard. I have an Asus a7n8x deluxe. The kernel has 
pcm support compiled in and the sound card works mostly, but 
occasionally the soundcard will not work properly.

For example:

    - xmms will be playing fine for an hour and then stop with the     
            generic error about the soundcard being unavailable
    - I'll pause mplayer and unpause it only to have it crash due to the
       soundcard being unavailable
    - snes9x will stop playing the sound after a short amount of         
            playtime

Most of the time, I see an error along the lines of an "illegal error". 
With mplayer and xmms, usually a couple of tries and the sound will work 
again. "fstat | grep dsp" will never output anything when the sound 
isn't working so I don't think anything else is blocking the soundcard 
plus I have 4 virtual channels set up so that shouldn't be possible anyway.

The problem is hard to cause or predict so I can't really provide more 
specific situations, but I'm hoping that this has happened to someone 
else before.

Thanks,
Nick

P.S. Has anyone seen anything about possible support of >2 channels on 
this board or support of the nvidia nic?