pulseaudio stops playing audio and spams system log with error

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Running Karmic Beta, though this error has been present at least since a6.

After an unknown period of time (my guess: around one hour), the system is unable to play sounds of user interface or applications.

Opening the Sound preferences incidentally makes the preferences box blammoon beyond full screen size, forcing me to close it in the taskbar. Also, it only shows 5 of the total alert sounds.

In addition, the console is spammed with these two kind of messages:

Oct 8 15:51:50 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 203 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:51:55 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 205 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:52:00 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 198 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:52:05 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 207 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:52:10 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 205 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:52:15 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 204 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:52:20 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: ratelimit.c: 200 events suppressed
Oct 8 15:57:48 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: too many inputs per sink.
Oct 8 15:57:48 equinox0 pulseaudio[2451]: sink-input.c: Failed to create sink input: too many inputs per sink.

(repeated many times; cut for the sake of brevity).

Rebooting solves the problem temporarily. WIll be on the lookout for what triggers it.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
ArecordDevices:
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: peter 2451 F.... pulseaudio
 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p: peter 2451 F...m pulseaudio
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xf9ef8000 irq 22'
   Mixer name : 'Nvidia MCP78 HDMI'
   Components : 'HDA:14f15051,17aa2106,00100000 HDA:10de0003,10de0101,00100000'
   Controls : 18
   Simple ctrls : 8
Date: Thu Oct 8 16:07:22 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: pulseaudio 1:0.9.18-0ubuntu3
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_DK.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.41-generic
SourcePackage: pulseaudio
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic x86_64