http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28040
--- Comment #2 from Jörg Höhle hoehle@users.sourceforge.net 2011-08-10 10:56:33 CDT --- Strange. For over a year or more, Wine has worked well enough with PulseAudio that I repeatedly forgot "pactl exit" after logging in, i.e. PulseAudio was used. So this "15 minutes" is hard to believe. OTOH, I've had PulseAudio signal errors in rare occasions, which are usually cured with "pactl exit" in Intrepid.
Intrepid is nice because it works with and without PulseAudio. It works decently with my machines, whereas e.g. Lucid has HW issues with audio after suspend/resume and with video flickering :-( I'm considering switching to Debian but it'll cost me time.
You forgot the fifth option which I hinted at: As snd_pcm_open returns -22, retry without the extra config to not shut the door on all people with not-the-newest OS (I refuse to say "old". 3 years is *not* old, except in politics).
It is not acceptable from a user perspective that a hack for PulseAudio causes loss of sound even on desktops that have PulseAudio installed but disabled.