Well, I thought I had posted more information yesterday but I don't see it so maybe it's all been a dilusion. Anyway it's all getting to be more trouble then it's probably worth.
Running aksaconf reported the card configured OK, then I lost all sound and Mplayer crashed and I had to reboot. All sound functions worked just fine (except Real player which was not installed).
Reinstalling Real Player (bin) from the command line produced the following errors:
Copying RealPlayer files...No write-permission to /etc/profile.d ...skip.
.Succeeded.
installing application icons resource...
installing document icons resource...
......Succeeded.
.Configuring Mozilla...
Installing .mo locale files...
Setting selinux context...
/usr/share or /usr/bin no write-permission...skip.
RealPlayer installation is complete.
Cleaning up installation files...
Done.
There are Real related files in the above directories but they are links and scripts, and don't appear to be history related.
I don't remember any error messages from the original successful install. I also tried to install the .rpm version a few days ago with no success.
Running Real Player from the command line produces errors:
ajb@linux-x2ln:~/RPlayer/RealPlayer> ./realplay
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:975

snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to create IPC semaphore
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:975

snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to create IPC semaphore
(message repeats many times}
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:975

snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to create IPC semaphore
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:975

snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to create IPC semaphore
./realplay: line 57: 2611 Floating point exception$HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@"
ajb@linux-x2ln:~/RPlayer/RealPlayer>
Using a video source I get video with no sound. Using an audio source I get nothing and the player goes away.
Lots of searching, including a brute force whole drive search for file containing parts of the old playlists that keep showing up produce nothing. I assume the old names are kept in some sort of compressed form or as some sort of pointers rather than as plain test.
The Find files/folders app in the green lizard button does look into hidden files just fine. So do “grep” and “find”, of course.