Sound in Ubuntu 9.10

[cema]

After a recent upgrade, ubuntu audio ostensibly stopped working. A short investigation showed that timidity would not let pulseaudio access the sound channel. Simply killing timidity fixes the problem. However, it has to be done every time the laptop is rebooted: I do not know how to fix it in the startup.

This did not help:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578