Killed speech-dispatcher and can't get it running again

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I had speech-dispatcher running perfectly fine on my slackware installation. 
That was until I connected my USB sound card. While the USB sound card was 
connected, speech still came from the internal sound card. After 
disconnecting the external sound card and rebooting, speech-dispatcher does 
not want to run. It does not come up with any errors, but it does not load. 
The internal sound card still works fine, I have tested running flite from 
the command line, and also playing audio files. I am using speech-dispatcher 
0.5 with flite as output. Any help on getting it running again would be 
welcome, and if anyone knows how to stop it happening in the future, also 
let me know.
From
Michael Whapples
"An optimist is someone who has never had much experience"