Sound bugs in Karmic Alpha 6 have anything to do with accessibility improvements?

[Dave Hunt]

Hi List!

I burned from the Karmic Alpha 6 downloaded on 19-September.  On the  
first two installation attempts, the AT-SPI Wrapper and Espeak  
applications closed unexpectedly.  On the 3rd attempt, only the AT-SPI  
Wrapper app closed.  I finally got the installation completed.  On  
post-install restart, I found that Espeak, controlled by Speech  
Dispatcher, is very responsive and that the speech does not stop at  
seemingly-random times, in the way it does when controlled by Gnome  
Speech Services under Jaunty.  However, there have ben occasions when  
Espeak crashed, requiring a restart of Speech Dispatcher and Orca to  
restore speech.  I have since installed Flite and find the speech  
system well-behaved.  After getting a system set up, I proceeded to  
set preferences, the first of these being volume and sound-effects.  I  
notice that there is no volume control applet on the Gnome panels or  
desktop.  I can set the master volume with alsamixer, but the settings  
do not persist across login sessions.  When I tried opening the sound  
applet under "system->preferences->sound", I hear a "waiting for sound  
system to respond" notice, and the applet hangs, with "cancel" as my  
only option.  Finally, any attempt to play an audio file using Totem  
Movie Player results in a "internal data flow error" message from the  
application.

I find an error related to the software package database when trying  
to install the Adobe Flash player app.  Something like "Trying to  
install flash plugin but I cannot find a source" report from Apt-get.   
I don't think this one is related to the errors above, but would like  
to find a solution.

Thanks for any suggestions!

--Dave Hunt