>> If you don't want to have to kickstart artsd like this, have it startup >> when you log in, and set the "timeout" value in kcontrol->Sound->Sound >> Server to something very low (mine is 3 seconds). Wine et. al. should >> still work and your system sounds will work from the get-go.
Thanks for the reply, David! I think you're right on there. In experimenting a bit, here's what I discovered. In sound preferences, I have 'start arts server at startup' unchecked. As such, there is no system sounds, but I can use Windows media player under Wine and video/audio works great in it. If I go ahead and play a wav with noatun, xmms... any program, at that point artsd is off and running, and stays running. If I then try using Wine/Mplayer, it errors out as the driver Wine is using is for OSS. If I kill artsd, I'm back to the beginning, no system sounds, but Wine is fat, dumb and happy again. There is an arts driver for Wine that I've tried, but the version I had was a bit buggy and caused more problems than it solved. So, unless there's an option to use artsd only when needed, and have it unload when not, it a matter of utilizing whichever sound setup is needed for the program wanting to be used, ie: killing artsd manually if it's running and I'm going to use a Windows app. Definitly not the end of the world... at least it's making a bit of sense to me now. Thanks again!
