For some reason, Ubuntu Karmic wasn’t saving my sound volume and settings that I set using the Sound Preferences. After attempting to run alsactl store I got:
$ alsactl store
alsactl: save_state:1530: Cannot open /var/lib/alsa/asound.state for writing: Permission denied
$ sudo alsactl store
E: core-util.c: Home directory /home/mycurrentuser not ours.
So I deciced to change “/var/lib/alsa/asound.state” ownership temporarily to the current user and then was able to successfully save my sound settings (then switched back ownership to root). I also added “alsactl restore” to /etc/rc.local to automatically reload my sound settings when I reboot.