Restarting alsasound causes xfce4-panel to disappear and the theme to change

[John Shane]

I've been trying to get sound working on my X30 ThinkPad with Suse 9.3.
One of the things I've tried is to restart sound with the command 

/etc/init.d/alsasound restart

Sound didn't start working but the xfce4 panel disappeared and the theme
changed. Just to be sure I tried it several times and each time there was
the same result.  What kind of conflict would cause that? IRQ?  Any
suggestions how to trace the cause of this conflict?

Rgds, John