I updated my laptop a few days ago and suddenly it failed to shutdown correctly, it powered down but without finishing the shutdown process. Today, while reading the spanish users mailing list I found the solution.
In /etc/conf.d/alsasound, set:
UNLOAD_ON_STOP=”no”
KILLPROC_ON_STOP=”no”
This fixed the problem. Here is the original thread
I’ve been trying to make ekiga work on my laptop, using pulseaudio and the internal mics for months without success. Today, while procrastinating after lunch, I finally make it work.
My laptop is a Thinkpad T61, and my first problem was that I couldn’t make ekiga recognize any input from my internal mics, but I found this page with a step-by-step process on how to make it work:
1. do 'alsamixer -Va' and set the microphone to capture and unmute it. 2. get out of there, then go ahead and do 'alsamixer -c 0 -V capture' 3. make sure it's set to record from internal, make sure that both channels from mic are set to capture 4. press space bar on the capture to enable capturing 5. now test if it works by recording your voice by 'arecord test.wav' --speak-- Ctrl-C, then play it with 'aplay test.wav'
On the original post the record was set to mic but I set it to internal. To get ekiga to recognize the input I changed all the devices from default to Intel HDA.
If you don’t know why ekiga is great, read this blog post, in a nutshell ekiga gives you a communication based on open standards, different options on VoIP providers, and a regular phone number for free 
Hope this helps somebody with a similar problem.