Sound dies - restart without reboot?

[Steven Rogers]

I'm having trouble with the sound going out on my G4 (10.2.6) at odd 
times. I can't really strongly correlate it with anything.  When it 
quits, *nothing* makes a sound - not the volume adjustment knobs, 
nothing. Its been happening for a while - at least 10.2.4.  Sometimes 
it happens after a few hours, sometimes the system runs for a week 
without rebooting and no problems. A reboot always fixes it. Is there 
some background process that can be restarted to fix this?  Is anyone 
else seeing the problem?

SR