Sound problems: Is it caused by udev?

[MartinG]

Hi, sorry for the speculative subject line.

I've read numerous of posts on all kinds of sound issues in Fedora, and
seen both ALSA and pulseaudio being blamed.

Personally, I've had problems with sound since Fedora 9
(everything worked just fine in Fedora (Core) 4 to 8). My problems have
been missing sound, "crackling" sound, pulseaudio eating all my CPU, etc,
but most importantly, I've had loud "pops" coming out even when my sound
has been muted. This has made it impossible to use headphones on
my laptop, since it would in fact hurt my ears if I did.

Now to the point: I have no idea where the problem comes from, but
would gladly try to help out finding the core of the problem. Could it be
that the sound issues are related to udev?
(if this is impossible, please let me know)

The reason I'm asking, is that when I boot, right before I get the
"Setting hostname"
message, I get a "pop" in the speaker. I am almost 100% sure I did not get this
pop in earlier kernel versions (ie. those shipped with Fedora 8). But
I've had this
happening with all of the latest kernels (probably since my sound problems
started in Fedora 9).
If I'm not mistaken, the only thing that happens before the hostname is set, is
udev starting.

Here's my old smolt profile [1] of my laptop (now running Rawhide), since
smolt is currently broken in Rawhide.

I've got one more (old) laptop (Fedora 10, [2]) and a mediacenter
(Fedora 9, [3])
available for tests, both had sound problems, both worked around by not using
pulseadio. (I have not had the "popping sound" issue on startup on these
two machines, though)

thanks,
MartinG

[1] http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_01507560-2bed-4c14-94a5-c72964bb4b84
[2] http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_f1a76ea6-5a5a-4ba1-8faa-31a88aac1fc9
[3] http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_beb51ef3-5b0c-4677-b244-ed17d171844f