So this patch should fix things up, but it's not yet complete. I realised (a little late) that the PA_SINK_SYNC_VOLUMES flag is still being altered after the sink was created, so I would propose to change this to some internal variable to avoid doing this. That said, this should work as a proof of concept and seems to work in the (minor) testing I've done. My USB handset that suffers from this problem works OOTB without any custom PCIID hacks which is nice, but the fourth patch may be a little broken in terms of being too eager to remove what it perceives as 'redundant' paths. Please let me know your thoughts. Col