Comment 1 for bug 235990

This happens for me as well.

It is definitely exacerbated by the presence of ALSA applications (in my case: skype, the flash 9 debug player which doesn't work with libflashsupport, the AIR debug runtime).

I have 4 hardy machines I use regularly, one of which was a fresh install and three which were upgraded from gutsy. The ones upgraded from gutsy have all exhibited this problem. However, the one with the fresh install appears not to. It may just be that I haven't tickled the bug there, though.

The wedged applications are always frozen in a "read()" system call on the pulseaudio socket.

Killing the pulseaudio daemon itself (it only responds to -KILL) seems to unfreeze all the wedged applications by allowing those calls to complete. I have not managed to get any useful strace output from pulseaudio itself yet, but this is due to some mistakes on my part, next time it happens I should be able to.