see, i'm not reproducing this..

so, whatever busted the output resolved itself.

see, what i did was cut the program while the mixer was on, then restart the mixer. and that fixed it in real time. then i rebooted.

so, it could have been some kind of crossed path. the hardware mixer might have picked up something connected to the m-audio card, then dropped it and recreated a correct path, which it's now holding to.

hopefully, it's that easy.