Sounds problems, crashing Firefox

[Cliff Flood <cliph@cli.ph>]

Hello,

I'm having a quite annoying and productivity impacting issue with sound 
on my workstation. (my $HOME/.esd.conf and $HOME/.asoundrc are attached)
When ever I encounter a website that has flash that includes sound 
(annoying I know) my browser Firefox crashes. My sound card (I have a 
Dell Optiplex GX240) doesn't support hardware mixing so there's what I 
think is a mostly working attempt to achieve software mixing in my .asoundrc

Some thing's not right and I'm having to kill a hung Firefox several 
times a day. If anyone has a working software mixing setup, or can point 
me to some useful resources I'd really appreciate it.

Regards,

--
Cliph/ff
http://chicks-dig-unix.net/

#d.conf for use with ALSA and the dmix plugin, for ALSA-level
# software mixing across all apps.  esd is required to support the
# Flash plugin and Java, along with other old applications.
#
# Run with:
#
#    aoss esd -nobeeps &

[esd]
auto_spawn=0
spawn_options=-nobeeps
spawn_wait_ms=100
default_options=

# .asoundrc for use with ALSA and the dmix plugin, for ALSA-level
# software mixing across all apps.
#
# http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=AlsaSharing
# http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

pcm.dmix0 {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 219345           # any unique number here
    slave {
            pcm "hw:0,0"
            period_time 0
            buffer_time 0
            period_size 2048    # jm: much smoother than 1024/8192!
            buffer_size 32768
            rate 44100
    }

    bindings {
        0 0   # from 0 => to 0
        1 1   # from 1 => to 1
    }
}

pcm.dsp0 {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "dmix0"
}

# this makes native ALSA apps default to using dmix
pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "dmix0"
}

ctl.dsp0 {
  type hw
  card 0
}

ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
}