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ALSA Sound suddendly stops to work on Intel Chipset

On my laptop, equiped with an Centrino chipset, my sound suddenly stopped to work. Well suddendly is the wrong word, as I do not use sound regulary on my laptop.

Also, the kmix applet did not show any problem, as it somehow declared my internal (never used) modem as sound card.  Interrestingly, some applications did manage it to properly playback sound (e.g pidgin), but obviously not using alsa as sound backend.

Today I found some time to look after the problem: Alsa loaded the snd_i810m Kernel module, which is the "Modem Module" for the i810 chipset. If this module is unloaded, sound will immediatly start working again. (Okay, after restarting alsa)

But fiddling around with rmmod and insmod every reboot is not my intention, so I needed a permanent fix:

Blacklisting the offender: uncomment the "snd_i810_m" entry in /etc/modutils/alsa-blacklist

This was my first solution to get it working fast. However, this will disable the modem function, but as I do not need this anyway, I do not care.  If you need it, you simply have to insert the module later in the boot process.