Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade quashes audio

The other night, as I usually do, I accepted a slew of Ubuntu updates.  My audio was gone afterwards.

After some searching, this thread proved helpful: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449  but I did need to figure out what an appropriate ASLA driver would be.

The soundcard list on the ASLA site showed two options; I went for the HDA one, since

lspci -v

showed HDA from the NVIDIA driver on my ASUS board, that is to say I needed the snd-hda-intel  driver.   Not intuitive, but it worked... sort of...

I followed the instructions on the ubuntuforums link to build from sources, compiling the snd-hda-intel driver with the help of module-assistant (building couldn't have been easier).

The volume control panel has trouble opening (I'm not sure if this is because of the debug build).   Basic sound works, but my Logitech headset is no longer seen, and so my skype is out of commission (does not make me happy - my phone of preference suddenly was made inoperable!).

UPDATE:
It appears that the generic 10de NVIDIA HDA (OSS mixer) sound device, if selected from the volume control hangs the volume control - and you can (?) never get back to it.  The applet is gnome-volume-control:  and when it hangs, you can't even select another window, do anything at all.  CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a normal terminal login allows you to find and kill that process.  Then you can get back to the X-Win screens (CTRL-ALT-F7).

I tried installing from the Ubuntu distribution (as per the Ubuntu Forums);  I tried building from the alsa sources from Ubuntu;  I tried building from the ALSA latest sources (all drivers) from the ALSA-Project.   I tried both before, and after (repeatedly) removing pulseaudio.   I tested, looked thru the lsmod list on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10) install.

As one last ditch, I'm going to try to remove what the Ubuntu Forums suggest, get it back to distro with apt-get, and then build the entire distro ASLA sources, and see what that gets me.

cd /usr/src; sudo tar xjvf alsa-driver.tar.bz2; cd modules/alsa-driver
sudo ./configure  --with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) --with-cards=all --with-isapnp=yes --with-sequencer=yes --with-oss=yes
sudo make

I thought about removing a little more than the Ubuntu Forums say - e.g. libasound2 and libasound2-plugins - but apt-get pulled far too many libraries into the mix with that - close to 300.   For now, I'll just try the standard thing the forum suggests:

 sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

 sudo apt-get install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

 sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Next, I'll install the ASLA driver as I built it over this:

sudo make install

and reboot...

It looks like pulseaudio doesn't know what to do.  I have rhythmbox playing music through speakers, while I try a test call with skype.   I can initially succeed in having the outputs separate, but I get no input through the skype app from the headset microphone.  If I try, the music shifts into the headset (out of the speakers) and, on a song transition, back again.

Finally I'll try what I posted here in the first place about removing pulseaudio:

killall pulseaudio
sudo aptitude remove pulseaudio
sudo aptitude install esound
sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

It looks like this works.  There is a bit of a caveat: the pulseaudio server seems to be running;  I had to su (sudo was not sufficient) to stop it  (pulseaudio --kill).  It looks like I'd created a .asoundrc file which started up pulseaudio; if you have one, you will want to comment out any pulseaudio lines in it, or (as in my case) remove the file (pulse was the only stuff in it).  Everywhere in /etc  it is set to NOT start on startup, but it is there, and can run, for example, when fired by the menu item Applications->Sound & Video->PulseAudio Volume Control.  It may be useful to remove these applications

UPDATE:
Well, I have restored Skype (more fundamentally, usb Logitech headset recognition on this installation) - this seemed to be accomplished by building / installing _all_ the sound drivers.

For future fallbacks, I can (still) use skype on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10), or my Fedora-11/64 install.

This was way more work than I would ever want a normal system update to cause me.  Perhaps its time to think of a simple mercurial versioning of update actions, perhaps limited to the last 10 revisions (or so) - a rollback system like, for example, Windows has.

Anybody up for designing this for the Linux community?