I looked a bit closer than before and saw that the openal packages in karmic (and lucid) come from the "openal-soft" (not "openal") package. Lucid has newer ones, so a next step could be to try how blender 2.5 behaves under lucid.
** Package changed: openal (Ubuntu) => openal-soft (Ubuntu) -- blender 2.5 regression - cpu flatlines at 100% on default scene https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/472687 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
