"I did fined another issue in that if you shut down it did a reboot instead"
i haven't found a similar problem in amd platform, only on old intel mainboards
you could try verifying if there is a bios update and also if you have another sound card to replace that one, could work
about kde 3, is it your pc old? mine is 6+ years old and works very well with kde4 but i have 1 gb of ram