On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 9:33 PM, Kyle
It's a bit of a dirty hack, but it works on this box, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it anywhere it's needed.
If PulseAudio is muting your master volume control when it starts, first copy /usr/bin/start/pulseaudio-x11 to /usr/local/bin
sudo cp /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 /usr/local/bin
Edit the local copy (/usr/local/bin/start-**pulseaudio-x11) and add a line similar to the following at the end of the file:
amixer -D hw set Master 92% unmute
Again, it's a hack, but it effectively gives all GNOME users, and hopefully anyone else on the system who starts a PulseAudio session, sound at a sensible volume. The same or similar line should be able to be added to start-pulseaudio-kde in the same way, and it can also be added to your local shell configuration/profile as well if you start PulseAudio some other way. It doesn't fix the bug specifically, but it gives satisfactory results.
I don't have this particular bug, but I guess that it is related to pulseaudio trying to save and restore the volume of the soundcard between sessions. Can you try commenting out the relevant lines in the file "/etc/pulse/default.pa" (or "~/.pulse/default.pa" if it exist) and "/etc/pulse/system.pa". The relevant lines are the ones just after the comments: ### Automatically restore the volume of streams and devices Maybe only one of them is faulty (I bet on "module-card-restore"), but you may start removing all of them and see whether it helps. Regards. -- Rodrigo