Comment 4 for bug 108577

Just to make my previous comment more clear, installing pulseaudio causes all alsa sound to stop working when something triggers its launching, apparently by trying to use esd.

In other words, a newly installed system with pulseaudio installed soon stops to output sound and fuser points to pulseaudio as the culprit, then causing the user (I'm not the first from some searches on the web) to conclude that pulseaudio is something that prevents sound from working and should be uninstalled.

In the meantime, however, ln -s /tmp/.esd /tmp/.esd-`id -u` took care of it for me