The last few days I have had issues with audio on my iMac. The symptoms were quite odd:

• The volume control on the menu bar is greyed out
• Launching System Preferences and opening the Sound preference panel indicates there is no hardware available
• The entire system ran extremely slow, yet Activity Monitor didn’t show any excessive CPU usage
• Looking in Console revealed a number of System Diagnostic Reports files, labeled coreaudiod_yyyy-mm-dd-hhmmss_localhost.crash
• The System Log Queries in Console contained reports of com.apple.audio.coreaudiod crashing and restarting the process every 10 seconds

There didn’t appear to be any obvious issues to identify in any of these files. In the end, I found a web page (will post when I find it again) that suggested that a corrupted iPhoto library could cause coreaudiod to crash. After deleting the library and restarting, my audio was back. I have since lost audio and restored it following the same procedure.

I am going to continue to update this post as I look for a root cause for the audio/iPhoto issue.

Audio still flaky.  Reviewing Console logs.  First segmentation fault of com.apple.audio.coreaudiod occurs in two places; after starting timer for Dropbox client, and after initializing com.kodak.BonjourAgent for Kodak EasyShare printer.