I withdraw this bug.
Sorry about it. It turned out the hard disk drive is dodgy - only after
a long format under Windows Vista the drive seems to now have assigned
spare sectors to broken ones (formatting took all night).
Now it seems to be running as normal.
For reference: It's a Western
** Attachment added: AlsaDevices.txt
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/48124521/AlsaDevices.txt
** Attachment added: AplayDevices.txt
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/48124522/AplayDevices.txt
** Attachment added: ArecordDevices.txt
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/48124523/ArecordDevices.txt
