What is your make/model laptop?
It's a Lenovo Thinkpad.
Not familiar with laptops....but I suppose their audio device still
sits on the PCI bus.... What does....
lspci | grep -i audio
show?
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio
Controller (rev 03)
Does that help?
I was able to figure out that the program responsible for the
notification area audio widget is PNMixer, and I was able to get it back
by running:
pnmixer
Unfortunately, however, it's only the icon, and my sound hasn't returned
with it. :(