The problem

After installing PCLinuxOS on an Acer 5051AWXMi laptop, the sound would disappear whenever I rebooted the computer.

This was strange behavior, as when ran it from the Live CD, it worked perfectly. Furthermore, if I ran the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Configurator in a terminal, (command = alsaconf), the sound would work yet again until the next time I rebooted the machine.

Clearly from the afore mentioned behavior, something wasn't happening during the boot sequence - part 1.