Yesterday's Ubuntu updates produced a rash of pulseaudio changes, and suddenly alsa works with wine, without stumbling. Today's secret to making it work: In System/Preferences/Startup applications, uncheck pulseaudio sudo apt-get install esound sudo nano /etc/pulse/client.conf autospawn = no Then every time your computer starts, run killall pulseaudio in terminal first. (Because the Startup Applications menu doesn't really work.) I trained and ran pulseaudio without a problem. I also tried oss yesterday, and that seemed to be working again, too. I usually follow the above directions but do not install esound or kill pulseaudio and then run the wine app with padsp.
If anyone has any different experiences with today's karmic updates, I would be interested to hear about them.
Susan