aRts in and of itself is a buggy hack, KDE is droipping it in the 4.0 release, Skype crashes if you use artsdsp with it and play sound, arts is also known to just segfault for no reason whatsoever. Best suggestion is to drop support for aRts entirely, it won't be around much longer.
Arts has been unmaintained for many years now. As the original author I was on the mailing list for a number of years and support was bad even when the arts plugin was originally written. The website documentation was out of date, it was difficult to find the latest version of the code.
If there is something we can do to get arts working now that would be great since many people still use it and will continue to do so for some years. I'm certainly looking forward to when it is end-of-lifed with kde 4.0.
Chris