Ubuntu and Multimedia (audio, in particular)

I've just found with the "killer app" for Ubuntu.  And by "killer app" I mean "the app that kills any chance of widespread adoption".  That application is multimedia.

Let me first explain my setup.  I have a laptop -- a Sony -- with a built-in sound system.  It stinks, so I also have an external Sound Blaster (USB).  Ubuntu recognises both sound systems and loads drivers for them.  It then plays setup games so damned frustrating that it basically renders my system completely worthless as a multimedia platform.  Here's what happens.

1) Despite my setting the default sound card in System->Preferences->Sound to my Sound Blaster, the only thing that reliably plays sounds out to the Sound Blaster are the system event notifications.  I get nice, loud, clear sound events going out to my speakers for GAIM and for menus opening and closing, not to mention sporadically (yes, sporadically) getting sounds when windows open and close.

2) Totem, in particular, will play at random to my Sound Blaster or to my internal sound card (and crappy laptop speakers, of course.)  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme nor reason to which one it chooses.  I can click on the same movie file a dozen times and half the time it will play to the Sound Blaster and half the time it will play to the crappy system.  And it's not alternating either.  It may play to one three times in succession and then play to the other once and back again.  It's ridiculous.

3) This point #2 applies only, of course, when Totem bothers to play sounds at all.  Because on some files it will complain that the audio device is "busy" and ask me if another application is using it.  Here it is reliably on individual files.  I can play one file, get the random switching behaviour described above and then click on one of the "death" files and have it complain that the audio device -- note: the audio device it was just using! -- is "busy" and "in use by another application".  Needless to say I can't persuade it that the device in question is not, in fact, busy.  It just pops up the dialog and refuses... well, dialogue.  And what is the difference between the movies that it can't play and the movies that it can (at random, albeit)?  Well, you got me.  They're all -- every single one -- AVIs encoded in Xvid.  No tools I have access to show any kind of difference between them.

Now for comparison, let me explain to you how these files worked under Windows -- going all the way back to Windows 98.  (Yes,  back to an OS that was released seven years ago.)

1)  I set up my system by installing the appropriate codecs (just like I had to in Ubuntu) and telling it which sound card is used by default.
2)  I play the movies.
3)  The audio invariably goes out the correct sound card and never complains about the device being busy.

When I demonstrate Ubuntu to people I'm hoping to persuade to use, how persuasive do you think that dialog that claims the sound card is busy is going to be?  Or the random switch between sound systems?

Now some practical questions:
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