Comment 40 for bug 476652

Just an addendum: Since I filed this report, I have been running the command "pulseaudio -k" on startup with "autospawn=no" in my ~/.pulse/client.conf and this mostly makes things work provided I am using smplayer or vlc for playback (where I can set audio to alsa). Unfortunately this does leave me without a volume control applet and the standard apps wont play audio (totem, banshee, nautilus preview etc). I have found that adobe flash will sometimes kill audio for whatever reason, even with no pulseaudio loaded, but a "alsa force-reload" will bring it back in that case.

And i've tested this out: If i start pulseaudio with a "pulseaudio -D", the problems are back, kill it again and it all works fine.