With the switch to Alsa in Fedora I am having this annoying issue of the sound being set to zero on each reboot. The reason for this is the ALSA 'PCM' device always going back to zero on reboot. This means on each reboot I need to go into gnome-volume control (gst-mixer) and adjust it to get sound. I tried asking the gst-mixer author to fix it, but he said it was an os/alsa fault not a gst-mixer bug.
Small correction. It is the emulated OSS 'PCM' device that gets set to zero.
This should be fixed in a later initscripts package ; settings are saved on shutdown.