pulseaudio conflicts with my TDE

Has anybody else had this problem? On reboots I started getting an error message in the startup shell (never getting to the login screen): "Failed to create secure directory //.config/pulse I searched the forums, tried various solutions, and eventually just purged everything possible that I could find connected to pulse. (I always preferred ALSA, anyway.) Some Trinity packages seem to depend on pulse or pulse libraries, though, so I wonder if it's possible to get rid of everything pulse without breaking my system. On a side note, I have similar problems with VLC. I cannot actually *use* it, as it crashes every time. I have made do with smplayer, which is okay, I guess, but I still miss the old VLC. When I try to uninstall or purge VLC, however, I find that it would also uninstall practically all my KDE and TDE packages. I don't know if the two are related, but if I am not using them, or they cause problems, then I'd like to get rid of them completely. All help or observations are welcome. Bill