Ok. This issue has been ongoing since day 1. I have pretty much just put up with it but now it's really bothering me. I want to simply use any sound application at any time. I can use totem and firefox and such but I cannot use applications like Livestation with anything else that needs sound (including pidgin). Nor can I use Jin (chess application) with songbird. Something isn't right and I just can't put my finger on it.

I have searched the heck out of as many forums as I can find and even googled it to death. So, with all that I am at the end of the rope. Any advice would be appreciated as always. Thanks in advance everyone.

What distro are you using? If your using a wack crap distro like Gentoo then of course nothing like this works. On any current mainstream distro using PulseAudio you should be able to mux the audio of applications without a problem.

As a wild guess try making sure esound daemon is running and your ESOUND variable is set before starting the misbehaving application. If the esddsp script is available try running that before starting to app to make sure the pre-load of the libraries is setup. (This all assume you are using GNOME, and not on a distribution with PulseAudio).