Ever since I installed 8.04 I've been having freezing issues. Sometimes I'll go a whole day and it will be fine, but other times I will have to shutdown and restart my laptop in order to not only get back my sound which goes out as well but to also get back the ability to use the task bar.

I'm not sure how well I've diagnosed this problem but it seems to occur when I listen to music through Audacious while on Pidgin and Firefox. It also seems to happen when I have OpenOffice Word Processor, Audacious, Pidgen and Firefox open. What happens is that I'll listen to a song or two and then stop and do some work. Then I'll take a break and try and listen to another song only to have Audacious not play; when I try and open a track or physically click on a song Audacious will open but it will open as if I had only opened the program and not tried to play anything.

Then I'll usually go to website to watch a video to see if its just Audacious or my entire sound and sure enough its my entire sound. Then, in this no sound state, if I proceed to open the colume control it will not open up, and if I try and open a terminal it simply freezes and I must Force Quit. After that my task bars (top and bottom) cease to function. The only way I seem to be able to get my computer back to normal is to hold the power button until it turns off and then restart it. Note though that desktop icons seem to work and I can continue to use Firefox; however just today my Envince Document Viewer would not load and that too resulted in my task bar being frozen.

Perhaps it is a hardware issue; I'm using a an HP dv6000t laptop, dual-core 1.73 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Or maybe it is a sound card problem, but since the sound seemed to work right out of the box and since I can get it to work fairly easily I don't think so.

Any suggestions?