Just had a lovely couple of hours tracing a problem where firefox would hang very quickly after start-up; even right clicking on a menu item made it hang. I had missed the fact that the speaker symbol was absent in the task bar (volume on my speakers was off anyway), but finally managed to trace the issue to pulseaudio. Unplugging my webcam and usb headphones before booting solves the issue. Found a similar statement on an ubuntu list--but hope this is helpful to someone searching for this issue. Niels
