Hi. Actually I don't need alsasound because I do have oss. I think that somehow the debian installer was either trying to install alsa or found some remnants of it on my system and with both alsa and commerical oss trying to work, neither was working quite right. I recompiled manually, without the debian installer, and got rid of all alsa files, and now I am able to play .asx files. Thanks. Cheryl
