Found it. (Alsa/Thinkpad)

[dmorin at morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

Ok, found it.  Early in my playing around I'd put the mixer applet into 
Gnome's panel (it didn't work, of course) and then forgot all about 
it.  That was screwing up aumix.  I got rid of mixer applet, ran aumix, and 
now everything is just ducky.

I also learned something about /proc. :)  My brain was saying "If you can 
cat it, then it must have length."  Kind of a weird concept to see 
something have a 0 associated with it (I'm thinking of stuff like 
/proc/asound/cards) but still be able to cat it and get data.

Sorry for the trouble.

Duane