Sound is working fine for me on my Fedora-9 Thinkpad T43, but when I boot I get the message that pulseaudio is not working, and sound is reverting to (I think) ac97.
I see in /var/log/messages the messages Aug 23 10:22:46 carrie pulseaudio[2317]: pid.c: Daemon already running. Aug 23 10:22:46 carrie pulseaudio[2317]: main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed. However, pulseaudio daemon does not appear to be running now.
This seems to be a purely academic question, but I'd be interested to know (a) why pulseaudio is not running, and (b) whether this matters?