Alsa and EsounD

[wonderbread]

I recently installed the alsa drivers, and the sound quality they give out from my card (an intel i8x0 on a dell latitude laptop) is noticeably better than with the oss drivers from the kernel. However, esound does not want to work at all now with x. Esound works fine from the command line, but once X has started, the sound is full of noise and cracks. Any ideas as to what could be causing this? I've compiled esound with both USE='alsa' and USE='-alsa'
Thanks.