Comment 67 for bug 274124

Forgot to mention yesterday that I also tested the most recent proposed workaround, and I haven't been able to trigger the race yet.

I need to mention that in my case, the only times when I could trigger the race were due to the login sound (via canberra-gtk-play) grabbing the sound device during session login prior to pulseaudio having attempted to load module-alsa-sink/source. Because intrepid's pulseaudio daemon (0.9.10) does not actually fail catastrophically in that case, the workaround listed above by various people (pulseaudio -k ; pulseaudio -D) rectifies the problem. However, it is clearly manual and therefore suboptimal.

I'm willing to poke at this for an 8.10.1 milestone or later (but not for 9.04, since that will go directly to pulseaudio 0.9.13, which has a different workaround), but properly resolving the race for 0.9.10 involves having the daemon queue the data upon failure (really, PA_STREAM_FAILED), retry/poke the sink/source after some time, reset the stream state, and process the data. Adding such a fix is pretty invasive this close to release, so I propose we just add Luke's most recent workaround for 8.10.