Comment 43 for bug 646862

Just as a followup - I think my issues with PulseAudio are just that it isn't not working at all for me on Kubuntu - for instance mplayer (a 64-bit app) produces no sound unless I tell it to use ALSA instead of PA. So it's not related to this bug. Unfortunately it is not possible to purge PulseAudio from Kubuntu, too much depends on it. :-(

You will also find that the package upgrade would have restored the permissions on those files anyway - at least it did for me.