Installed Etch and it said that pulseaudio was a 'drop in replacement' for esound and was much better than esound and that esound was horrible.

So installed pulseaudio instead. Now have no sound anywhere - can't recall if this coincided with installation of pulseaudio.

Did 'pulseaudio -nC' which means, I think: don't read config file and open pulseaudio's command line.

Got some sound with 'play-sample <nameOfSample sinkName>' after 'install-module module-detect' (which installed the two modules alsa-sink and alsa-source). But, for no apparent reason, this no longer works 'install-module module-detect' just gives a load of red error messages. Is there a simple way of getting pulseaudio to work? Thanks any help.

Wouldn't you want to use Alsa for your sound?

Yes but I need sound inside the window manager, Enlightenment (normally done by esound, esd, which is fairly easy to sort).

try:

apt-get install pulseaudio-esound-compat

It is probably already installed... but you never know.