Adventures in Switching to Linux

Now that I have upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 I am utilizing PulseAudio instead of esd so the audio subsystem should be much better right? According to the Hardy release notes, PulseAudio

... makes it possible to mix audio from multiple applications together, assign audio from individual applications to specific sound cards, adjust volume levels of each individual application, and perform advanced operations on audio streams such as transferring the audio to another computer or changing sample formats and channel counts.

That sounds great. Only thing is it has been doing some strange things. Occasionally I lose sound on some or all applications. I haven't exhaustively tried to fix this problem yet but so far restarting has been the only solution.

I also just recently had a problem where only my left speaker was giving me any output. Fortunately muting and unmuting fixed that. I also read that adjusting the volume of both or more channels will also fix it.