On a Dell Inspiron Mini (Atom, GMA500, ...) laptop I have Mageia 3 installed, with an LXDE desktop. Now I have the problem that sometimes sound doesn't work.
In that case mplayer cannot play any video, it stalls in about 0.5 second. And it's sound related. If I disable sound in mplayer (by choosing null as output device), it runs fine. But as soon as I open a terminal, and login as root, it begins to play. As soon as I logout, it stalls again.
Having a root shell open as work-around is good enough for me, but I wonder which strange mechanism is involved here. I can imagine that some initialisation in .profile or something like that can get the sound going. But why does it stop on logging out? I checked, that session doesn't have anything running than bash.