okay, I listening to streaming MP3s as my normal source of music. If I go off for a long while (oh, 4...5 hours), the streaming connection usually craps out, and then nothing is played for a while. When I come back to listen to more music, double-click on a song in the playlist, it just locks up. It won't do anything at all, so I have to open up a console window, and kill -9 it
Then when I open it up again to try to play music, it freezes up the same way, except the window isn't there (cuz it hasn't opened yet). I tried running it from a console window to see if there was any debug output, but there wasn't. The last time this happened, I restarted my compy and seem to remember getting an error about the audio device. I'll try again and repost what that was.

okay, from memory, there was a line after the Sending all processes the TERM signal (not RIGHT after, but a few lines down):

<driver for audio device>, drain_dac, dma timeout
or something like that. Any ideas?

okay, it happened again, and then I tried to run a play command from the console, and it said:
sox: Can't open output file '/dev/dsp': Device or resource busy

Is there a way I can restart the audio service and clear out any usage of the audio device some way?

EDIT
I just got mail from logwatch...it says:

WARNING: Kernel Errors Present
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc)...: 141Time(s)