@Daniel: Thanks for the tips. Actually I have turned off pulse
autospawning before doing any tests for this bug report, and verified
that pulseaudio is not in the process list after killing it. (I had read
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log before) ;)

Also to make sure there is no confusion about the backend selection, I
switched vlc and exaile to use the alsa sink by manual selection,
additionally. So I guess it's safe to say that the problem is actually
not in pulseaudio. (All my observations I post here will be with
pulseaudio off, just to make clear.)

I did some testing with latencytop, but for my perception there is
nothing peculiar in the results. The system is mostly waiting for the
CPU. I guess that's normal? In the attachment is a pretty exemplary plot
from latencytop, perhaps the more experienced eyes amongst us can pick
something up from there. Does alsa have a separate process that I could
have a special look at? I tried monitoring [hd-audio0], but that one
barely said anything in latencytop. Otherwise, would that point to the
fact that this would not be a scheduling issue? (Hence the mouse cursor
stuttering I experience being unrelated.)

Just to clarify, my sound problems are not the kind of echo/stutter that
some ICH9 users have experienced as described e.g. in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/274424. Mine
are plain old irregular dropouts, as if a buffer setting was too low.
Would you find an example recording useful for anything?

Speaking of buffer values, I tried finding out if there is any alsa buffer 
value that I could test around with, but without success. Is there such a thing?
Looking at the hda-intel diver side of things, I skipped through the codec 
documentation you hinted me to, David. At the current state though I don't know 
how to relate most of the stuff there to my problem. Of course the model 
detection might be wrong (even though all the alsa mixer mapping stuff seems to 
be correct). I could boot into my Ubuntu Studio 9.04 installation where the hda 
card does work flawlessly with alsa and compare lshw/dmesg outputs...?

On the hda-intel note, I read the alsa hda-intel troubleshooting notes,
but none of the stuff really gave me an idea. I installed and ran the
hda-analyzer python GUI tool to check the codec's internals, but I would
need some pointers what to look for/try out in there.

Thanks a lot for your efforts, Alex

** Attachment added: "latencytop exemplary values"
   http://launchpadlibrarian.net/35491969/latencytop

-- 
Audio stutters and glitches (Karmic, Intel HDA ICH8)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/479375
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