[LAU] Audio stopped working - troubleshooting help

Hello everyone, The setup has worked for many years. M-Audio 1010LT on Fedora 8. I know, old OS, I should update. Nevertheless, it worked nicely... until yesterday when suddenly mplayer would stop right in its track whne starting to play a .flv file. Same with xine: it freezed at the beginning of an ogg file, w/o any further error msg. Rebooting the machine, a KDE error was shown reporting that the sound device was not there. Indeed, there is no /dev/dsp. And, lspci does not list the audio card. In this case, dmesg reports nothing about the audio card, no good news, no errors. Rebooting a few times shows that sometimes dmesg does report: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:06.0[A] -> Link [APC1] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:01:06.0 to 64 invalid EEPROM version 0 invalid CS8427 signature 0x0: let me try again... unable to find CS8427 signature (expected 0x71, read 0x0), initialization is not completed CS8427 initialization failed ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:01:06.0 disabled ICE1712: probe of 0000:01:06.0 failed with error -14 ... Which is about the 1010lt. At other boot times the dsp device shows up but there's no audio, with 'mplayer -msglevel all=7 <file>' reporting: [AO_ALSA] Playback open error: Connection refused Failed to initialize audio driver 'alsa' AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Starting playback... What would this be really about ? Is this a case of a failing 1010lt card after so many years ? Can it suddenly fail anyways ? Or is it a power supply that fails to deliver the necessary voltage to the 1010lt ? Or would it be a motherboard whose PCI tracks are getting off the pcboard (or something like that) ? There was no software change made to the Fedora 8 OS. Is there a way to be certain of which component is failing ? Thanks for any suggestions, observations and comments. The audio component of the machine is quite useful and after a day now I already miss it and do not know how to approach this problem. I would not want to go out on a shopping spreee for a new MB (CPU, RAM) or/and new power supply or 1010LT card without knowing what is going on.