speakup and hald conflict in Slackware 12.2

[Adam Myrow]

I tested with Espeak as my software synthesizer, and espeakup driving it. 
There were no problems with hald.  I then went back to the Dectalk, and 
the problem came back.  Further, stopping hald after the fact didn't help. 
Even going into single-user mode didn't make Speakup respond normally. 
Only after disabling the startup script and rebooting did Speakup return 
to normal.  Thus, I wonder if the problem is that hald is doing something 
on the serial port that the Dectalk isn't liking?  I don't have any other 
serial synthesizers to test with.

Also, I noticed that speakupconf doesn't work correctly.  The command 
"speakupconf save" gives an error "cp: omitting directory `.'"  Running 
speakupconf load, returns "cat: write error: Invalid argument."