so I tried to reset my bios defaults earlier today to try to fix another problem that popped up and I accidentally enabled by builtin sound card… rather than rebooting to take advantage of my new /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist of snd_hda_intel, and my new /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf settings ( see: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/solving-onboard-and-usb-sound-card-issues-in-alsa/ ) so to be able to rmmod all the sound modules (snd or snd_something I first had to kill off pulseaudio at the same time as I removed the blocking snd module in this case snd_usb_audio
#killall pulseaudio;rmmod snd_usb_audio
after that module fell I could remove all the rest in an orderly fashion. and then once the evil snd_hda_intel was vanquished I just pulled the USB sound card out and plugged it back in, voila!