Comment 29 for bug 557421

Sorry for your problem.

In my case, removing the Timidity daemon solved the problem. (Silly of me to install it.) I have on board sound hardware. lspci found the hardware, ALSA found the hardware, but Pulseaudio (often) insisted that I had no sound card... until I purged the timidity daemon. After that, no problems. (Knocking wood...)

While I had this problem, I could always get audio by plugging in one of those inexpensive Chinese usb audio devices, both the cheap Tenx TP6911 devices or the more expensive C-Media guys. I would just plug them in after my computer finished booting.

Before you try a downrev to 9.04, try eliminating all the pulseaudio from your system, and see what happens. If that doesn't work, I wouldn't install 9.04, I'd install Debian squeeze.

Just my 2 cents.