Hi Beartooth,
Check to see how many copies of esd are running on your computer. There should only be one. Try, in a shell window: "ps -C esd". In order to get to the shell window you'll have to run another window manager (like Xfce). This happened to me a litle while ago, and killing the esd processes ("su -c 'killall esd'" or "su -c 'killall -9 esd'") did the trick for me. Best of luck!
-David Chipman
