My pulse issues have, for the most part, gone away. It helps to do a fresh install versus an upgrade from a previous distro. If that's not for you, I suggest going into Synaptic, navigate to your local/obsolete packages, and do a complete removal (to flush their config files). Then do an apt-get install ubuntu-desktop. This will grab all new packages that are intended to be installed as part of the base desktop distro. This will also install pulse, if you've removed it.