Comment 27 for bug 449783

It sounds (and is) stupid but a lot of my frustration with muted volumes after reboot was fixed by right-clicking on the volume control icon and un-muting there. For whatever reason, un-muting in gnome-alsa-mixer doesn't persist.

I *suspect* the reason is that pulse requires an obsessive degree of control over ~/.pulse. Most of my attempts to un-mute/kill/restart from the command line ended in a variant of "home dir is not ours". BTW this makes having /home on an NTFS partition "problematic". I hope this sticks - it seems like most of my Ubuntu time for the past 18 months has been spent googling sound fixes.