Don't know if it's kde related. This morning a large update, including kernel. Now kde tells me: "The audio playback device doesn't work, falling back to internal..." A look at system settings/multimedia tells me that it wants to remove pulseaudio. My log says: Apr 13 06:19:21 localhost rtkit-daemon[2070]: Sucessfully made thread 2068 of process 2068 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by '500' high priority at nice level -11. Apr 13 06:19:23 localhost rtkit-daemon[2070]: Sucessfully made thread 2319 of process 2068 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by '500' RT at priority 5. Apr 13 06:19:23 localhost rtkit-daemon[2070]: Sucessfully made thread 2322 of process 2068 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by '500' RT at priority 5. Apr 13 06:19:25 localhost rtkit-daemon[2070]: Sucessfully made thread 2362 of process 2362 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by '500' high priority at nice level -11. Apr 13 06:19:25 localhost pulseaudio[2362]: pid.c: Daemon already running. ps aux | grep pulse nbecker 2068 0.1 0.2 449432 5964 ? S<sl 06:19 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start nbecker 2359 0.0 0.1 92204 3124 ? S 06:19 0:00 /usr/libexec/pulse/gconf-helper Any ideas?