Orca problems with gnome under Ubuntu Edgy

[Jason Fayre <jfayre cocenter org>]

        Hello everyone,
This may be more of a gnome desktop question, but I'm hoping someone can 
help me.
Orca is acting fairly strange on my system.  I have install Ubuntu Edgy 
and have done a dist-upgrade.  I am running an amd64-based system, but I 
am using a standard x86 kernel.  When trying to use orca, the speech 
will studder after speaking.  For example, while arrowing down a menu, I 
will hear the menu item that is highlighted, followed by a short burst 
of sound from the synthesizer.  It sounds like it is starting to speak 
something and is very quickly cut off.
Also, periodically, I will arrow down to a line of text and the synth 
will keep repeating the text over and over again.  When I move to 
something else, te synthesizer will read the new item, but will still 
repeat it over and over again.
I have tried both Festival and DECtalk software.  I have also had gnome 
freeze while playing the Ubuntu startup sound.
I am having a lot of trouble pinning this down.   I can't tell if this 
is a sound card issue or a video card issue, or what.  I have tried two 
different sounds cards.  I have also trid installing the Nvidia drivers 
for the X server.
I am running an Asus a8n-vm motherboard.  It has on-board video and 
sound.  The board uses an NForce 4 chipset.  I have tried both the 
on-board sound and a soundblaster Audigy Platinum.  Both the cards are 
using ALSA.
Nothing seems to solve this.  Everything works fine on another system 
that I have at work that uses an Intel chipset.
Any help would be appreciated.