[sid1950]

Had this same problem with my laptop and 2 desktops. All openSuse 11.1 with KDE 3.5.10, and updates to 20th July 2009. Firefox 3.0.11 with the LQ Forums recommended multimedia plugins.

Before the fix - audio works in Kaffeine, Amarok, KRecord, Audacity, etc, but not on BBC News website or iPlayer. Returns about 1 time in 6 after rebooting.

The fix - read around on openSuse & LQ forums, and found this thread. Opened YaST, and searched for "pulse". List of PulseAudio and related plugins appears. Right click on list, and select "All in This List > Delete". First error message has 3 choices. 1st choice is to install about 11 alternative packages from Packman repo. Select 2nd choice "keep libpulse0-xxx", "OK" > "Accept", warning "Automatic change will add package - "esound-daemon". Click "Continue", reboot, all now OK.

Hopefully this will be a long term fix till they sort out whatever got broken. I use Audacity quite a lot, and had to change the input/output processor settings to ALSA. Haven't found any other applications with problems yet.