bad interaction with virtualbox

[Neal Becker]

Recently, virtualbox is not playing nice.  When I login, settings/multimedia 
shows phonon using 'default' which works fine.

When virtualbox is started, it reports it 'can't open audio device' or something 
like that.  I then see settings/multimedia lists a bunch more devices.  These 
include:

hda intel (alc268 audio)

hw:0,0
hw:1,0
hw:0,6

in addition to 'default', which is now grayed out.

And, now knotify4 is using 100% cpu.