If the mic doesn’t work in Skype, and your system does use PulseAudio (as most do these days) you might be missing alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit package on openSUSE / RPM or the lib32asound2-plugins on Debians...

to move control over sound card in case you have applied some dirty hacks you have to refer to root powers. First, remove all access to the sound card from current user (user1): setfacl -x u:user1 /dev/*dsp /dev/audio /dev/mixer* /dev/snd/*(^/)...