You can, you just have to be sure you handle all possible devices uniquely so the kernel never gets a chance to put something else there first. Renaming the devices is probably safer but Verne's scrips all refer to /dev/dspX and he doesn't want to have to change them!
For example my ethernet cards are lan0, lan1 which are locked down and eth0/1 randomly change.
That's what most of the documentation suggests.. but I think swapping them would have worked in your case too.
Ubuntu seems to cope with swapping eth0/eth1 etc. I'm not sure how, but according to a Debian rant (along the lines of "why was this crappy Ubuntu patch accepted into Debian"), it does a swap on the names - ie eth0 -> eth0-temp, eth1 -> eth0, eth0-temp -> eth1. Just like you learned in programming-school. This should mean you can define the order to whatever you want, and it will cope. I have heard about massive failures though, so be careful. Craig