Trying to unbollix-up my audio

[Kevin Cole]

Hi,

I used to have sound... Now, on rare, random occasions, my speakers
will give a "puff" of air, even when there doesn't appear to be
any activity which would cause a sound.  It could be hardware, but
I want to eliminate software as a cause if I can.  (I don't want
to crawl around behind all my clutter and disconnect stuff, if I
can avoid it.) Over the years I've put all sorts of crazy packages
into the box.  The "ps" command shows the following running at the
moment:

* pulseaudio --log-target=syslog -Lmodule-esound-compat-spawnfd
* artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 60 -m artsmessage -c drkonqi -l 3 -f
* esd -terminate -nobeeps -as 2 -spawnfd 17

(Those were the only ones that were obvious to me as sound related.)

I tried creating a new user, just in case some edit to a
~/.something file was getting in the way, but no joy.

So, does anything leap to mind? Should I be uninstalling
and/or reconfiguring any of the following packages (esd,
alsa, pulsaudio, arts):

alsa-base             alsa-utils        gstreamer0.10-alsa
libasound2            libasound2-dev    libasound2-doc
libasound2-plugins    libesd-alsa0      libpt-plugins-alsa
libsdl1.2debian-alsa  linux-sound-base  libgstreamer-plugins-pulse0.10-0
libpulse-browse0      libpulse-dev      libpulse-mainloop-glib0
libpulse0             pulseaudio        pulseaudio-esound-compat
esound-common         mpg123-esd        arts
artsbuilder           libakode2         libarts1-akode
libarts1-audiofile    libarts1-mpeglib  libarts1-xine
libarts1c2a           libartsc0         vlc-plugin-esd
vlc-plugin-arts

(Also lots of gstreamer0.10 stuff).

Thanks.
-- 
 Kevin Cole                    |  Key ID: 0xE6F332C7   (GPG/PGP)
 Ubuntu Linux DC LoCo Team     |     WWW: http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/
 Washington, D.C.  (USA)       |   Phone: +1.202.234.0213

           ". ! 1 |" -- Rene Magritte's computer

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