Comment 9 for bug 331292

Confirmed. But there seems to be a "pulseaudio catch", see below.

Btw, you can have users remain on a GUI (useful for correcting the problem over the phone):
You can in fact also

reboot to safety
get to a prompt
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
startx
and then just paste Mark Stover's string launching from any GUI terminal, inside
/var/cache/apt/archives/

sudo dpkg -i libgtk2.0-doc_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_all.deb libgtk2.0-common_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_all.deb libgtk2.0-bin_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_all.deb libgtk2.0-dev_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb libgtk2.0-0_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb gtk2-engines-pixbuf_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb libgail-dev_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb libgail-common_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb libgail18_2.15.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb

This will restore the previous configuration BUT seems at the same time to destroy the recent (yesterday or the day before) welcome uodate fix for all our pulseuadio problems on 64 bit boxes.

This -afaics- will compel us again to ditch pulseaudio or kill & restart it every boot with the usual
pulseaudio -k ; start-pulseaudio-x11
command

Any better solution?