Problems removing pulse audio

[doctordruidphd]

On another thread, there was a discussion of how to remove pulse audio, as a result of it messing up kmix on kde-4.5. I followed these instructions:

Completely removed the following packages:
gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio
pulseaudio
pulseaudio-esound-compat
pulseaudio-module-x11
pulseaudio-utils

using apt-get remove --purge <packagename>

After rebooting, I notice that certain things do not work. In firefox, I had to reconfigure xine to use alsa and not pulse, no big deal, and now it works.

But there are major headaches with alsa applications. I cannot get mplayer to work at all, and the problem seems to be that alsa is still configured to expect pulseaudio. Trying to run alsa-player produces the following:

greenman@Wolfenstein:~$ alsaplayer
ALSA lib pulse.c:229pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

snd_pcm_open: Connection refused (default)
Failed to initialize plugin!
Failed to register plugin: /usr/lib/alsaplayer/output/libalsa_out.so
Failed to load output plugin "alsa". Trying defaults.
ALSA lib pulse.c:229pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

snd_pcm_open: Connection refused (default)
Failed to initialize plugin!
/usr/lib/alsaplayer/output/libalsa_out.so failed to load
jack: server not running?
/usr/lib/alsaplayer/output/libjack_out.so failed to load

So it still 'thinks' pulseaudio is there.
Same sort of problem with mplayer - it wants pulseaudio, no matter how I try to congiure its settings.
Any ideas how to fix? I do have a backup and can return to pulseuadio if it's not fixable.

Edit: Removing /etc/asound.conf fixed the problem with alsaplayer and mplayer. But not with other sudio coming out of firefox; I haven't tested other applications yet.