I've run into this problem on Debian before and narrowed the problem down to
audio.  Macromedia coded the linux port of flash to only use /dev/dsp (said
to be fixed in Macromedia's next release for linux, but I believe
unavailable at this time) and /dev/dsp will only allow one application to
use it.  When flash tries to open /dev/dsp if something else (i.e. gnome,
esd, older applications) also has the audio device open.

The most interesting way to fix this problem is to install alsa-oss and
change the global config file for firefox /etc/
1. FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and
/etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc (by now it's set to "alsa09")
2. The alsa-oss package installed (by now it's not installed by default)
3. The autoaudiosink used by default for gstreamer (I think alsasink is used
now instead)

Number 3 is talking about changing the gstreamer-properties.

I got the above tip from an Ubuntu bug comment
http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/29760

Previously I have use libesd-alsa0 which worked pretty well if you tweaked
the /etc/esound/esd.conf to make esd drop the /dev/dsp connection after 5
seconds of inactivity and set gstreamer-properties to output through alsa.
But that meant that I had to turn off gnome sounds because it was never
giving up the esd control which made the next application hang/wait until
esd was idle.

I just started trying the alsa-oss fix on my home computer and haven't
really put it through any sort of paces.  It looked like everything worked
but I'm not sure if I have called 2 sound apps at the same time.  Let me
know if this works for you.

-- 
Jeff Rasmussen
GPG public key 0x9686C12F
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20060615/60548e0a/attachment.htm