Might have some kind of bug here. I want to know if anybody else is seeing this. It's happened twice now, so I should be able to repeat it. $ rpm -q centos-release centos-release-5-2.el5.centos On my desktop, I "su -" to another user. Then "nohup thunderbird", it gets the mail and plays the announcement. ISTM this is an error right off the bat as this user is not the desktop owner. But that's not the main point. I really am OK with that behavior in my instance. The problem is that the sound system goes muted, as indicated by the volume control on my desktop panel and I can't recover from it except by a reboot. When I try to open the sound control panel, I get an error panel saying "No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found". If I just try to un-mute, there's no error message but the status does not change. I've attached a snapshot of the error panel. Further, in chasing another problem that Jim (hce) had, we have done this: # find . -type f -exec echo {} \; -exec cat {} \; >/tmp/asound.play.bug Normally it acts as expected but now I get this. cat: ./acpi/event: Device or resource busy cat: ./sys/net/ipv6/route/flush: Operation not permitted cat: ./sys/net/ipv4/route/flush: Operation not permitted cat: ./sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register: Invalid argument cat: ./sysrq-trigger: Invalid argument and it hangs right there. <Ctl>-<C> breaks OK. I feel it might be related to Jim's problem. I feel it might be a bug. Can anybody reproduce? I think the T'bird step is coincidental. I think any sound played as another user should reproduce it. Hmmm ... I might be assuming to much if I assume another user is significant. TIA -- Bill -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: FlakySound.png Type: image/png Size: 18673 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080707/e9855af1/attachment-0004.png>