Debugging pulseaudio when autostarted by gnome or kde

[Yaakov Nemoy]

Hi List,

I'm having some troubles lately with Pulesaudio, where my music is
constantly cracking (pausing for a few milliseconds), and then
pulseaudio going down in flames, with a noticeable click on the
soundcard when it does.  While I can start pulseaudio back up, not all
programs can use it properly.  For example, once I start playing music
with exaile (which uses gstreamer, for the record), exaile works fine,
but flash and other apps cannot access either the sound card or
pulseaudio anymore.

Sometimes pulseaudio goes down in flames randomly after a fresh
login/reboot, and sometimes it waits until I put my laptop in standby.
 When I bring it back up, it's crashed about 50% of the time, even
from a new instance that I start in my session.

I understand that Pulseaudio is started when gnome-session tries to
start up esd.  Aside from the bizareness of this, how can I debug PA
when it's started up like this?  I know there's a -vv option, but I
can't imagine the best way to get PA to use that, and then where would
I find the output from it?

Cheers,
Yaakov