A "sound" observation

[Kevin Kofler]

Ed Greshko wrote:
> At this moment pulseaudio seems more of a PITA than anything and kind of
> crazy that a desktop environment would tie itself to it.

We also default to PulseAudio in KDE, this is not just a GNOME thing, 
PulseAudio is the default in Fedora in general.

Your problems seem to be due to proprietary software (VMware) not supporting 
PulseAudio properly. They're probably doing strange things to the ALSA API. 
This is not a Fedora problem.

        Kevin Kofler