I did a complete reformat of my laptop and put Kubuntu on it. I tried an upgrade from Intrepid, but I think that putting 8.02 on it made the update go not-so-smooth because there was a lot of breakage, and 8.02 didn't run so well anyhow on Intrepid.
So a reinstall gave me a very stable laptop that runs great, except that sound only worked through Amarok. Everything else gave some weird fuzzy sound.
A quick Google search revealed the following fix.
alsamixer -Dhw
I then simply increased the volume on the sound devices that were completely turned down and now I have sound from all other applications, like Miro and Flash-based software.