I still have pulseaudio installed, but I used pasuspender as well as attempting to use alsa directly, it made no difference. What did seem to make a little difference was un-muting the monitor for the monitor for my internal audio, via the pulseaudio volume control manager. This was based on reading about similar troubles in windows, and how some people had worked around it by enabling stereo mixing. It still takes a couple of minuted to load a level though. I don't think it's necessarily pulseaudio that's at issue, but I'd like to find out for sure. Is there any way I could trace back the issue to it's source? Thanks for your suggestions thus far.
