Not sure how many people this may have affected (if any at all), but if any of you develop with pygame in a *nix environment and have recently performed a kernel update and found pygame not getting anywhere past pygame.init(), it's because of ALSA locking up whenever it is called by any software that uses it.
I figured this out by splitting out the call to pygame.init() to pretty much every module that has an init method, and seeing it fail on hooking into ALSA (and also MPD, Neverwinter Nights, and lots of other software). The solution that I found was to first remove and then reinstall ALSA on my system, and then finally disable any network interfaces that did not have an active connection (I use wireless, but my machine has a built in wired network port that had somehow re-enabled itself silently at some point). Anyway, this is just an FYI to anyone who might have been hit by something similar recently. ~Chris CONFIDENTIAL NOTICE: This email including any attachments, contains confidential information belonging to the sender. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. This information is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this emailed information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please immediately notify us by reply email of the error and then delete this email immediately.