I was suffering from a soundproblem on my fresh Ubuntu Karmic installation. All programs using OpenAL would stop playing sound and start to play scratchy sounds until sound drops completely out. Plus those programs will hang when trying to shut them down. For example OpenArena and Warzone2100 are affected which comes really hard to me 
I tried a lot of different things with little success. Most solutions only helped for a moment until the problems came back. I think it's just that it works a little while after a reboot. Basically I don't know what really fixed the problem, but these changes here are in efffect right now and work for me.
- Add this PPAs and upgrade ALSA to the newest version in there
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stesind-alsa-21
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
- Also install the ALSA driver backports
apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic
Now you should have the newest ALSA running and sound should work again. I also applied some tweaks for HDA intel chipsets but I believe these don't do much of a difference. If you ask me to I'll provide these steps, too.