Sound problems on kubuntu 11.04

...yeah, suddenly I had no more sound on Kubuntu 11.04. It had been working up until now, a couple of months after a fresh install, but now sound is gone. I hate this! Yeah, I know KDE on Kubuntu is somewhat buggy, but I like it nonetheless.
However, on Debian I use to take a wonderful script for such situations (yes, sometimes it happened on Debian too), which was /usr/sbin/alsaconf shipped with alsa-utils. But for some reasons I don't know it isn't there anymore, at least not in Kubuntu 11.04. Uninstalling every single kernel module with modprobe -r is a bad idea. What to do?
Hey, there's this other tool, simply /sbin/alsa:

# alsa
Usage: /sbin/alsa {unload|reload|force-unload|force-reload|suspend|resume}


and this works fine, but for one reason: if fails to unload some modules because they're in use, even if I use the force-unload option. Why is that? Because for some reason the '/usr/bin/pulseaudio' is being restarted very fast, before it manages to unload all modules. The trick, although a little ugly:

# chmod a-x /usr/bin/pulseaudio
# alsa force-reload


...And there they are again my sound devices in System Preferences -> Multimedia!

Of course, don't forget to make pulseaudio executable again.