Comment 3 for bug 1596344

I guess I was mistaken about commenting out "load-module module-bluetooth-policy" and "load-module module-bluetooth-discover", that did not solve the problem for me.

A successful workaround though was to "sudo rm /xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop" which stops gnome-session from trying to start start-pulseaudio-x11 (and block until it signals completion of startup, which takes about 30 seconds).

Even without /xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop pulse is being spawned by something, as can be seen from "pgrep pulse", and I can play sounds fine.

I am *not* recommending this as a general solution for everyone as I do not know what ramifications there might be to not having /xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop that I just might not have noticed. I assume that it is there for a reason.