My guess is that you don't have esd or artsd running, so libao is using alsa or maybe even oss (this seems unlikely) as the sound playing method. And your sound card does not support playing multiple audio streams at once, so Rhythmbox locks your sound device and the Gaim threads that play sounds block until Rhythmbox exits.
I kinda thought alsa was suppose to combine multiple audio streams in the way that esd and arts do, but maybe not. I have a feeling if you started esd or artsd the problem would go away. And you might need to somehow tell Rhythmbox to use esd or artsd. -- After shutting down Rhythmbox, previous Gaim sounds are played https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/38621 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
