Audio device got stuck!

[The Wanderer]

I just dist-upgraded against testing, and after the upgrade, MPlayer
started to report

> Audio device got stuck!

over and over again (about once or twice a second, I think) during
playback of any file with audio, while not actually producing any
audible sound.

The solution to this turns out to be to kill (and, thus, implicitly
restart) the user-specific PulseAudio daemon:

$ pulseaudio --kill

With that done, MPlayer works fine again. (What I found in searching the
Web for the solution seems to indicate that other audio-using programs
would have had the same problem.)


What puzzles me is that none of the packages I saw listed for the
upgrade which triggered this seem related to PulseAudio, either directly
or in any obvious indirect way.

I'd like to figure out which package(s) were involved, so I can know
what packages I may need to do this again for future upgrades of.
However, I'm not managing to think of any reasonable way to identify
them.

Can anyone suggest a reasonable way to identify the full stack of
packages which pulseaudio (or, for that matter, any designated package)
depends on, either directly or indirectly?

--
The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw