Shutting down the computer overnight doesn't have anything to do with this. What does have to do with this is the hardware in your computer and that's also why many people have many different results (because everybody has different hardware).

The best results I had with this problem were right around April 7th when Ubuntu 9.04 had just come out and I moved to Luke's PPA (+ I was using a Turtle Beach sound card). Everything worked fantasticly at that time. Since then, the Turtle Beach card mysteriously died and I've had to switch to a card that came with the motherboard that uses the HDA Intel driver and it's just awful. I can't play any sound on the host OS for longer than a couple of seconds without ALSA dying and spamming the syslog.

Anyway, my point is that there are solutions out there that have been posted by many people but those solutions really only work if you have matching hardware. Until VMware Workstation supports PulseAudio natively we're just going to have to suffer with "fixes" and "solutions" that don't really fix or solve anything.

Shoot, even supporting the ALSA interface would be great. The OSS interface they still use has been deprecated long ago.

I can't say. But I've been installing a VirtualBox VM in the meantime. I need the audio to work reliably.

The choppy/scratchy is actually a Linux scheduler regression somewhere around 2.6.29 - the scheduler is so proactive about moving threads to a single core to power down other cores that it ends up creating large latency problems on that one core. I shouldn't single out Linux either - Windows 7 has the same behavior, though it's less pronounced.

We're actively looking into workarounds. A CPU-intensive guest workload tends to avoid the regression.

I can confirm that the Pulseaudio problem went away with Workstation7.
The "ALSA default sound card" option hooks onto Pulseaudio perfectly.

If you have choppy sound in a Windows guest do not forget to turn off sound hardware acceleration inside the guest.
XP Guest > Control Panel > Sound and Audio Device Properties > Volume > Speaker Settings > Advanced > Performance
Set the Hardware Accel and the Sample Rate to the lowest settings and reboot the guest.

Curious if you have a fresh install of 9.10? I upgraded from 9.04 and sound in my XP Guest is still choppy long after startup. I've tried the other hints in this thread but with no luck. Any suggestions welcome..