No sound from headphones

[jswhite]

I'm on LM13 and having a rather annoying sound issue with my Inspiron 17r. The sound has otherwise been flawless, but when I plug headphones in I don't get any sound at all. The speakers stop emitting sound (as they should), but nothing comes out of the headphones. Removing the headphones makes sound come out of the speakers (again, as it should). I checked sound settings, nothing is muted, volume is turned up, etc. Everything indicates that it should be working, but it isn't.

I decided on a whim to check alsamixer to see if there was anything that showed up there as being muted (even though it wasn't showing up in sound settings). Sure enough, the thir column in alsamixer ("<Speaker>") was showing as muted. I jacked the volume up on that and it solved the problem. Unfortunately, if I restart the computer, walk away for awhile, etc., it goes back and I have to change it again in alsamixer to get sound through the headphones again. Anybody have any idea what's going on here and, more importantly, how I can change that? I figure there's probably a .conf file or something somewhere that I can alter, but I need some help figuring this out.