Comment 34 for bug 440465

I agree with the last two paragraphs of post #33.

The increased instability of Ubuntu scares me, since it is a real threat to new users. Although I get frustrated myself, I have some experience of fixing things even when the problem does not follow a "common -nix logic". I have brought a number of users to Ubuntu so far, however, this influx may be jeopardized by the issues like pulseaudio. Personally, I do get it when it is a new card and does not have to be stable. What if it has been stable with alsa/oss/esd before? I hope pulseaudio is not being nice just to me and most users especially newbies are not hurt...

What is more disappointing is there is less and less ALTERNATIVES out there. I am not ready for it...

However, I posted it earlier concerning some other pulseaudio issues https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/439815 . I was able to build gnome-media package without pulseaudio:
deinstall it first then
To rebuild gnome-media-2.28.1 from source: download and unpack the source package. cd to the directory. You will have to do "sudo apt-get build-dep gnome-media", with which pulseaudio libs could be also be installed, it is harmless I guess at this point. Then configure like this.

 ./configure --disable-pulseaudio --enable-gstmix --enable-gstprops --enable-grecord --disable-scrollkeeper
  Then I used "fakeroot make" with "checkinstall" to compile and build it.

 I can now run gnome-volume-control with oss and/or alsa mixers... However, I still get issues with the notification area applets on GNOME. Rhythmbox is acting up, perhaps, becuase it uses pulse as the output, I got amarok, audacious, xmms and mplayer instead :)
 Nevertheless, haven't had any system locks (which most likely were due to pulseaudio server) ever since I removed the package.
Hope, it helps some