Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Once in a while, my audio will die.  There's no clear pattern, save that it
seems to happen on the order of hours to days, and seems to happen only when
audio is being played...and is somehow tied to the X server itself.  Possibly
XMMS is involved, though I suspect that it only happens with XMMS because
that's the only program that I leave in control of the audio for such long
stretches of time.  I've had it happen after perhaps 12 hours, and after a
few days.  Once the audio dies, I can't see any way to recover it by normal
means---but if I exit the X server and re-run "startx", everything is fine.

It doesn't seem to favor any particular time of day, and often the computer
is doing little else besides decoding an OggVorbis sound file.

When it does, it generally makes a choked screech.  XMMS will freeze the
audio playback (but will still respond to GUI events).  Any further attempt
to play with the few audio-using programs  that come to mind will go
nowhere...until I exit X.

The audio output is a VIA auvia device, and the OS is NetBSD 1.6 (not
1.6.1), with a few security updates (some libraries and of course sshd).


dmesg doesn't show anything all that unusual.  (There are usually numerous
audio errors recorded, though they don't seem to correspond to playback
problems and don't tell me much.)  The only errors are as follows, and
do not happen particularly close to the failure as far as I can tell (and
there are a LOT of them):

auvia0: codec invalid


Is this a known issue, or likely related to a known issue (other than
"VIA sucks" (^&)?



-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/