Well, this is interesting. I was playing with the different sound drivers after installing Ubuntu on my laptop. OSS worked fine until I was messing around for a bit and it stopped being able to open the device. Alsa I thought wasn't working at all, but then I realized it was just playing the first little bit of a sound, then cutting out, and it had the severe framerate issues it did in Debian. SDL sound was doing the same thing, but after I ran SDL for a minute or two, it smoothed out and started working normally (though it seems there was a bit of lag between when the sound should have played and when I heard it).
My laptop is a Dell 700m. I'm not sure exactly what sound card it has -- RealTec something, I think.