At the risk of falling foul of BLOGMA 2001, an update on the new computer saga.
I bought a new (cheap commodity) sound card today, this time an AudioExcel card
based on something called the CM8738, which is known to have some support under Linux. I installed it and compiled the driver (a weird, standalone one). It worked well enough
when playing MP3s and such, but VMWare didn't like it.
I tried the alternative
ALSA driver
suite, and it worked a lot better.
One curiosity: I noticed that the CD that came with the sound card had drivers
not only for various Microsoft-spawn but also for "Linux". On closer inspection,
the Linux driver turned out to be a copy of the experimental driver sources
bundled with the 2.2.13 kernel (the one which didn't work with VMWare).