I was able to fix this by first killing npviewer.bin (after using lsof | grep pcm to find which process was holding onto the sound), then using sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart and then sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart. Restarting alsa-utils alone did not fix it. Thanks.
I was able to fix this by first killing npviewer.bin (after using lsof | grep pcm to find which process was holding onto the sound), then using sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart and then sudo /etc/init. d/alsa- utils restart. Restarting alsa-utils alone did not fix it. Thanks.