Pulse recently replaced esound as the dependent sound server for gnome[1], esound has been marked dead.
You might have some relative success if you drop pulse and do some per-application configuration to redirect their default output to alsa or OSS. While this would work for applications such as gstreamer (gstreamer-properties), pidgin, vlc, mplayer.. you will find yourself with a broken gnome. You'll need a new mixer application, setup software mixing (or hardware if your card privides) etc.
You may find life simpler by disabling [2] pulse, rather than removing it.
[1] http://live.gnome.org/PulseAudio [2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=928817#p928817
2011/12/23 Ionut Biru ibiru@archlinux.org:
On 12/23/2011 11:25 AM, Ralf Madorf wrote:
On Fri, 2011-12-23 at 11:17 +0200, Ionut Biru wrote:
can you clarify that you are talking about pulseaudio and not about libpulse?
# pacman -Rss pulseaudio checking dependencies... error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) :: gnome-settings-daemon: requires pulseaudio :: pulseaudio-alsa: requires pulseaudio
ok then, gnome requires pulseaudio. The only way to get rid of pulseaudio is to get rid of gnome.
-- Ionuț