Comment 2 for bug 449589

Ugh. alsa-utils is the original culprit for this symptom and is the
reason the start action was changed in the most recent upload.

For all intents and purposes, across the various Karmic installs that
I have access to, I cannot reproduce this symptom, as PulseAudio
correctly restores the device and stream volumes.

Please verify that reverting the relevant change[0] in the most recent
upload resolves your issue, and then we can move forward with
troubleshooting what's probably a race condition in the invocation of
alsactl store.

[0] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/alsa-utils/ubuntu.new/revision/29
-- note that you just need to comment out that line (353)