Comment 11 for bug 246969

I noticed that when this was occurring on VMWare Fusion (for OS X), there was a constant buzzing sound around the time when the login tone should happen - even if I had disabled the virtual sound card. After a bit of trial and error, I thought this may be coming from the system speaker, and it turns out unloading the module snd_pcsp prevents the noise *and* the freezing when logging in.

It seems that this is two seperate bugs - Ubuntu using the system speaker to play sounds on, and VMWare locking up when this piece of virtual hardware is used for prolonged periods. The Ubuntu forums thread - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=845844 - seems to deal with the first problem, although I can't find a corresponding launchpad bug, and VMWare probably need to be alerted of the second issue.