Sound sometimes stops playing in hardy

[tchomby]

I'm trying to fix an issue on a friend's laptop. It's a fully updated
hardy/8.04 install. Every now and then, in the middle of a session,
sound will stop playing. Any sound player: totem, rhythmbox, mplayer,
etc., will show progress stuck at 0 and play no sound when you press
play. It affects any type of sound, local mp3 or ogg file, stream,
etc. Sometimes trying to play another file will cause everything to
start working again but generally not. A restart fixes it temporarily.

I searched launchpad etc. but couldn't find any information about
this. Is it a known bug? Is there a workaround? Will upgrading to
Intrepid get rid of it?

I suspect this is something to do with pulseaudio, which I think was
introduced for hardy.

The laptop in question is a ThinkPad R60e, the audio is an onboard
Intel 82801G (module snd_hda_intel). I'll attach the complete output
of lshw as a file.

Thanks
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: lshw.txt
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20081224/d4517432/attachment.txt>