After installing mandrake 9.2 everything worked ok except the sound, any ideas?
Also I recently changed to an optical mouse, although it functions ok the movement is very jumpy and fine movements get very frustrating any info would be helpfull

To get proper help with your sound you need to state your kit & what the problem is. Silence? Stammering? Playing backwards & revealing hidden messages?
One cheat for hardware problems with Linux is to try booting up Knoppix, the distro that runs entirely from a CD - Knoppix has the best hardware autoconfiguring I have seen under Linux.
See how knoppix deals with your hardware & then take out the CD & reboot (that is the beauty of it) into mandrake & try & configure it to run the same way.
You can download knoppix for free; if you do not have broadband or a sympathetic friend (thanks Adrian!) you can buy it cheeply from cheep Linux. (or was that cheeply from cheap Linux?)

Once again the swimming pools of life had been tainted by the incontinent toddlers of fate

Good news is I've sorted the mouse but still nop sound.
System is as follows- intel PIII 550, pc chips m741mrt mobo with on board sound, there is no sound at all, nothing, zilch, diddly sqaut, sweet fa. hope this helps

One of the more obvious - have you opened up the sound mixer & made sure all the volumes are up? Some distro's start with them all turned down after install. Hope this doesn't sound patronising but it is a common pitfall.
What are you using to try and produce a sound: MP3? AudioCD? Both?

Once again the swimming pools of life had been tainted by the incontinent toddlers of fate

I can listen to CDs ok, not tried mp3 or ogg files yet. the sound control icon when moved produces a clicking noise when moved up and down only, I have a game based on breakout, which has a sound setting so I assume there should be sound effects but at the mo only silence.
Only had this setup running a couple of weeks so i'm still learning

Wouldn't it be a good idea to try a few other things before assuming that the sound doesn't work? If they do work (as your CD does) then your problem is with the configuration of your game, not your operating system.

Once again the swimming pools of life had been tainted by the incontinent toddlers of fate

As I said this is all new to me, but so far I think I have enabled sound on startup and certain events. I have also tried changing from alsa to oss drivers , I have checked the mixer controls all OK.
The game has sound enabled but no sound is made, tried another game which produces a very crackly sound. unfortunatley I don't know what else to try, which is why i'm here, i'm now going to try the cmedia web site for any drivers but in the meantime any more help would be helpfull.