The simple fact is that sound worked fine in Fedora 7 and is broken in Fedora 8, at least for me and a good number of others. Pulseaudio is clearly not ready for general use and should never have been included. I just wasted another hour or so trying to get sound to work on my system -- it worked fine yesterday, but doesn't today, for no obvious reason -- and now I've tried removing pulseaudio. vlc and kaffeine are still looking for pulseaudio, however, and I don't know how to fix that. Maybe I have to log out or reboot, sigh. Danny.