Kudzu and Linux

Greetings!
A few weeks ago I reinstalled RedHat 7.1 on my machine and since then i've been having several problems with hardware that used to work when i first installed RH from scratch, but now is just sitting there idly. It wouldn't mount the fat32 drive anymore (I worked around that one, seems like it wans't included in my fstab), and my sound card (Sound blaster Live, emu10k1) is just plain dead. Now, when I look at the kudzu hardware config file, everything for the sound card looks fine except that it is listed as a VIDEO device. Now here's my question: may this be the reason why my sound card is not working, if so, how could I fix it, if not, any suggestions on what to look for? I don't have much experience with *NIX, but I can work around bash (i think) and vi (i'll have to thank my C++ professor for that one)

Regards...

PS: is it possible that i left out important files on the installation? I pretty much stripped it of several things that came in the default installation but I didn't think were necessary, like the kernel developenent section and netscape communicator packages (i use Mozilla and lynx instead)