I've recently reinstalled a fresh copy of Kubuntu 10.4 LTS 64 bit, and I've set up all my normal programs, and utilities. I've had no issues, except for this annoying little thing. If I'm running a game in Wine, and also have Pidgin open, and I'm talking to people, I will get no sound from Pidgin. But everything else works. If I want to play music in Amarok, that works. If I want to watch a video off my harddrive, that works. If I want to do anything on a browser that has audio, that works. Only thing I've encountered that doesn't work is sound in Pidgin. I've tried changing the sound output for Pidgin, to no avail. Nothing works.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Try checking to see if you have Pulseaudio running, Pidgin may not be correctly configured to use it.

Thanks for your reply. I checked the system monitor while having a game running in Wine, and Pidgin, and there is no pulse audio running. I actually don't even recall if Kubuntu has pulse audio or not.

Please run "winecfg" and confirm that Wine is using the "ALSA" backend. You may also wish to check which audio backend and output Pidgin has selected.

Yep, Wine is using ALSA, and Pidgin's output was set to automatic. I had fooled around with those settings in the past, there was a few I could change it to like ESD, Console Beep, etc. None of them seemed to work.

The issue is likely with a missing GNOME or GStreamer component. Other than checking that all packages are up to date, and testing under a new user, I don't know of anything else to do...

My appologies for the late reply. After much testing, and hastle with other issues. I decided to switch distros, and move to Arch Linux. In doing so, and setting up Wine and Pidgin. Everything seems to work again. Even though it would have been nice to know why I had the issue to begin with, I'm happy it's gone now. Thanks for your suggestions and help.