esd freezes gnome, plz help!

[Leonardo Canducci <leocand@tin.it>]

when I log into X (woody, 2.4.17-k7 kernel with ext3, gnome 1.4 with 
nautilus) with sound (esd on es1371 ac97 codec) gnome freezes even before 
showing the loading status image.
if I kill gnome-session, disable sound (.gnome/sound/system) and log 
without sound all works well. but I want sound to work!!!
if I launch esd from console and then log in X it works, so it should not 
be a hardware problem.
what should I do?
I tried changing esd.conf setting auto_spawn=1 but nothing changed.

Any suggestion?

Thanks!