I tried about everything I could find on all forums. It was Ubuntu and the
driver for the Nvidia. For some reason 10.10 saw the Nvidia as a multimedia
card, and nothing would dissuade 10.10.

I upgraded to 11.04, and didn't manually install the driver for the Nvidia, and
the sound worked! Unity wouldn't. Said I had the wrong configuration to run
Unity. So Unity didn't see the card on installation either. Finally got tired of
futzing and reinstalled 11.04, telling it to get all updates, etc, and this time
Ubuntu got it right!
Really a nuisance. Sound card just fine in XP drive where I don't particularly
need it.