[hoary] - infinite drumming problem (again!)

[andrew fries]

Please help - I've been bitten by the 'infinite drumming' bug. It is an 
obscure but real condition, mentioned in several threads related to 
Warty. For example http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2861.html 
or http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-4337.html .

Basically, when gdm login screen comes up, this looping drumming sound 
starts and never goes away. There is no problem entering user 
name/password in gdm, but the login process gets as far as displaying 
the brown wallpaper, and just hangs there. Top does not show any 
significant usage, but clearly the system is waiting for something it is 
not getting... BTW, restarting gdm does not help, nor does waiting 
nearly an hour now... (when I had this problem on Warty, the desktop did 
eventually appear after about 15 minutes, and then I was able to turn 
off a sound setting from the menu. But not this time!)

This problem appeared on Warty but it was never resolved properly, as 
the above URLs will show. Now I installed Hoary (clean install), and it 
is back!!

While I think this is some unfortunate combination of my hardware and 
Ubuntu configuration, the problem is unique to Ubuntu. I have Foresight 
Linux in another partion and it works fine, despite also using Gnome 2.10...

I'll be glad to provide more info to assist troubleshooting, just tell 
me what you need!