thanks for the reply!
I think I'm good now. Late last night I discovered that the dsp sets the default volume level of the stereo mix to zero. Cranked it up and it worked, at least for two zones playing different songs. too sleepy to add another, that's for tonight
I don't think I ever saw it explained plainly, so since I was lucky enough to figure it out on my own, I'll summarize here for anyone else who simply wants 3 outputs out of one of the accepted types of cards.
First, some disclaimers: I know squat about sound processing and had never heard of a dsp until last night. All i know is that my zones now work. I am also relatively certain that nothing but winamp will output sound at the moment, because I didn't hook anything else up in the dsp to the soundcard, although I'm guessing that that is what the Inputs are for. That will be for tonight's late night session. This "guide" could very well be a train wreck, but it worked for me.
I found this page to graphically explain what it needs to look like when you're done.
http://members.home.nl/nahutec/kxtutor/quickkx.htm
All you need to do is "clear dsp" (which will have repercussions to the other sound producing items on your pc, those will need to be manually reconnected, and no I don't know how to do that yet
) and then add these plugins, which if I recall are located in the Profx and Basic (i'm not at home, so i'm going on memory here) menus in the "right-click" context menu. You will have one Src and one "stereo mix" plugin for each instance of winamp, all of those plugin pairs are then connected to the "k1lt" plugin (or k2lt depending on the card you have, it will tell you if you guess wrong!), which represents the sound card itself. You will want to make sure that there is a signal coming from your source, which you can check by finding the Peak plugin (i think in Basic) and attaching it to the source. This is how I figured out that my problem was in the stereo mix, as Peak told me I was outputting a signal, but the sound card wasn't getting anything. I double clicked the stereo mix plugin, and it showed that the volume was set to zero.
As I said, this works for me, but I know I still have a lot of work to do to make sure everything else is capable of producing sound (like dscaler, games, etc), since I basically gutted the driver by clearing the dsp. I welcome anyone's suggestions to correct errors in the above, or to do things more simply than I have as described here.
thanks again for the help!