[orca-list] Speech driver crash hangs Desktop



Hi Everybody
Using gnome-speech + espeak on a 64-bit dual core system, I occasionally
get a seg fault of espeak-synthesis-driver. Ordinarily this wouldn't be
too bad, considering Orca should just be able to be restarted. The
problem I'm having, however, is that once this happens the GNOME desktop
itself is frozen solid until I drop to a text console and kill Orca
manually, at which point the desktop unfreezes and executes any actions
that have been queued up since the freeze.
System details:
Ubuntu 9.04, GNOME 2.26.1 and latest pull of Orca (though Orca version
seems to make no difference here), gnome-speech 0.4.25, espeak 1.40.20
(test builds of espeak actually seg fault less than 1.40). Macbook,
Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.40ghz, 4gb of ram. Tested both with and without
Pulseaudio, happens just as often regardless.
I'm not necessarily as concerned with espeak's segfaulting, that's an
espeak problem that seems to affect dual-core CPUs. What gets to me is
that orca hangs the desktop when this happens. Would it not be possible
for Orca to restart the gnome-speech services or, failing that, to exit
gracefully when the speech system dies? These lock-ups do not happen
with speech-dispatcher, however as anyone who has used the sd_espeak
driver on a dual core CPU has found out, it crashes horrifically
requiring a restart of speech dispatcher every minute or so. However, it
does not hang the desktop like orca+gnome-speech combination does when
the speech driver crashes.
Finally, this is not limited to the espeak driver, it will happen when
any of the gnome-speech drivers crash. So far I've experienced it with
espeak, dectalk, viavoice, and swift.
Can this be looked at? I don't know enough about gnome-speech that I'd
feel confident in doing much about it myself and, while I know
gnome-speech will eventually be deprecated, until certain things in sd
are fixed for certain system configurations it'll be with us for a while
yet.
Any thoughts? Has anyone else seen this in general?

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