I realized I was still on a prerelease version of 10.10, so I updated
and found the same problems occur.  I also tested with Rhythmbox and got
the same behavior.  No one but pulseaudio is using sounds devices in
/dev/snd/ when I check.  ck-list-sessions shows the same basic output
(timestamps are different).

However, I also noticed that if I used Ctrl+Alt+Fn (CAFn) to switch
consoles, I found an interesting behavior.  If I switch from user to
user with CAFn, only one of the users work, but if I switch from user to
a virtual terminal (like F1) then to the second user, that user has
working sound.

To further test this I tried creating a third user.  After some
experimentation I found that switching from a user with working sound to
another user with sound would cause the sound to fail, but then
switching to a third user would result in the sound working for that
third user.  This was very reproducible.  It seems that switching from a
user with working sound to any console results in that console not
having working sound.  Switching at that point results in a user having
working sound.  Also switching among consoles with no sound didn't
follow this pattern of parity.  The sound worked on the first console we
switched to with sound (the parity of the number of switches among
different non-sound consoles didn't matter).  Also, a user logged in but
not playing any sound yet would act as a non-sound console.  A user
logged in that had played sound, but was now not playing sound, would
act as a sound playing console.

So to summarize, switching from a console with sound to another would
result in no sound on the second console.  Switching from a console with
no sound (whether it is because the console never had sound, or the
sound wasn't working) to another with sound would result in the sound
working on the second console.  This also explains why switching through
gdm results in working sound for the second user, since you are
switching to the gdm console first (which then wouldn't have sound),
then to the second user.

Perhaps there is some race condition with releasing the sound and
someone else picking it up?  I have no idea if that makes any sense
since I don't know the underlying mechanisms at play here.

-- 
Pulseaudio stops working when switching users
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/649507
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