Pulseaudio Server Connection Refused

Pulseaudio seems to be this deep magic thing. I know very little about how it works or how to configure it; the limit of my experience is just messing with the padevchooser and paprefs dialogs in Fedora, Ubuntu, and now OpenSUSE.

Running the beta3 liveCD. Sound works just fine, and I can read the "Manager..." setting from the Pulseaudio tray applet menu and see my sound server set up perfectly.

Post-install. After I do a fresh install of the liveCD (automatically suggested options all the way through), upon reboot, my sound no longer works. (Bootup sound doesn't play).

• Trying to run "test" sounds from the GNOME Sound Properties applet yields a strange gconf error.
• Going to Yast2 - Hardware - Sound still detects the sound card, and Novell's test sound works. But it's the only one.
• I noticed that there is no "pulseaudio-alsa" plugin installed. I tried installing that from OSS repository, and reboot, but it still doesn't work.
• All the manager dialogs in padevchooser say "connection refused." Clicking the Connect button doesn't work.

It's one of those intel Toshiba satellite laptops (a205-S4777) with that RealTek HD audio card. I've heard about problems with this sound card, but frankly it worked in 10.3, and it worked in Fedora 9 with Pulseaudio, and it worked on the darn liveCD. I have no idea why it should stop working the minute I install it.

Anybody have a similar problem/any suggestion? I'd give some more detailed error messages, but since I did the kernel update I can't reboot into the 11 install just this moment.

[*]Going to Yast2 - Hardware - Sound still detects the sound card, and Novell's test sound works. But it's the only one.[/b]

That suggests to me this is a permissions problem ...

i.e. sound probably works as user root, but not as a regular user. Try adding your regular users to group audio. The openSUSE audio troubleshooting guide has some words on this:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AudioTroublesho...issions_Problem

And if that doesn't work, please provide MORE information on your hardware. Best help would be if you provide the URL that is provided by running these two diagnostic scripts:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AudioTroublesho...led_information

and the output of typing in a konsole
<span style="font-family:Courier New">rpm -qa | grep alsa
uname -a
cat /etc/modprobe.d/sound
cat /proc/asound/cards</span>

Good luck!

No idea why, but I bittorrented the 11.0b3 DVD today, and when I do a fresh GNOME install from it, sound works fine. I'm listening to streaming classical music through Banshee now.

The liveCD consistently gave me that problem every time, but I suppose I'm willing to ignore it if the DVD works alright.

EDIT: Oh curses. Post-DVD-install, after updating Pulseaudio with the factory update, it broke again with 'connection refused'. Oh well...at least it worked for a little while...