If you are having sound issues, I recommend trying Mint Mate (or my personal favorite, KDE).. 99.9% will work from the LiveDisc
Oh.. since I mentioned Mint KDE.. I had to add an icon to be able to shut down.. The only options I have, other than that, are sleep, lock, log out, or switch user.. small part they forgot :p (may be fixed by now).
Not really looking to change distros. I've invested a fair amount of time in the fedora line over the years, and have come to understand many of its quirks. Don't particularly want to have to change to something else. Sound "works" for me, it's just that there is likely some program that's trying to be all fancy with surround processing that I haven't been able to locate the configs for.