Comment 28 for bug 288093

Its not just flash. I'm having the same intermittent crashing (usually every 1-2 days), and many times I'm doing nothing but streaming audio via VLC. (unless of course open office has flash embedded -grin.).

This is a pulse audio issue pure and simple. Flash may get the blame as its used a lot, but when my pulse crashes, firefox locks up (if it is running), and any video/audio applications do the same until the daemon and apps using the daemon are manually killed either by command line or by system manager. Then manually restarting pulse via command line and then restarting the a/v applications normally. There is no rhyme nor reason to it other than it is an every 1-3 day occurrence.

If it weren't for the fact that the distribution and gnome are firmly on the path to keeping pulse as the default, I would rip it out and use Alsa as the default, but at this point unless we wish to change distributions or 'self maintain', we're stuck with this....er.........improvement to sound management.