Comment 455 for bug 371897

Yes, that is a common problem. It happens with most games if you run them for enough time, 1 hour into Left 4 Dead 2 and the audio dies (just for wine of course, other programs aren't affected at all), the only way to get it back is to restart both pulse. By the way, restarting pulse means that you have to restart any programs using audio output (and some of them crash in doing so, see rhythmbox) or they'll go mute, making the whole thing even more annoying.
It looks like nobody will fix this anytime soon, just look for how long they've been ignoring this issue. The only answers you'll get will be either "whine at your distro's mainteiners and make them update alsa-plugins to the latest git" (and it still won't solve this problem) or "remove pulsaudio and go back to alsa" (because who needs pulse? On a totally unrelated topic, switch to Netscape, no need for new fancy browsers or new web standards)... Yet pulseaudio is "officially supported through alsa".
So yeah, never thought I'd say this, but if you need audio output you should really consider a dual boot system with Linux and Windows, Wine simply won't work as for now.
PROVE ME WRONG AND FIXE AUDIO ISSUES WITH PULSE PLEASE.