Turning off autospawn indeed made pulseaudio behave as desired, and stay away, thank you.
I've yet to have the crash again since then... BUT, I do just plain lose sound at about the same interval that I was having the crash. So my theory now is that it's the same bug, and pulse reacts by crashing the game as well as itself, but ALSA just dies quietly. The debug output is much quieter now... I just get a bunch of each of these lines: Corrupt JPEG data: 57 extraneous bytes before marker 0xdb warning: Unknown nb_ctl request: 4 -- wine crashes in Source games since jaunty https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/367379 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs