[Hampshire] Lost sound

Short of rebooting my PC how can I restart the sound system on my PC?

If I try to run Amarok I get the following error

"xine was unable to initialize any audio drivers"

I get no sound out of any other sound related programs either.

Th PC has been running for 22 days and sound was working ok yesterday

I am running Mepis 8 (Debian Lenny)

Tim