debian wheezy new install various

[Keith Barrett]

Just done a new install of wheezy and have a few questions.
First, what is the situation with pulse regarding using speakup and 
orca?  Is it better to remove pulse completely?  Am trying to avoid a 
complete loss of speech for obvious reasons.

Currently, if I try and log in to the gui I loose speech in the console 
and I am not sure that I get logged in to the desktop.

At that point, I am able to log in as root without speech and shut it down.

Also, I am getting a lot of error messages when speech starts during the 
boot process, mainly about audio and files not found.

Finally, can I change speakup to a faster speech rate and make that the 
default?

I have tryed adding parameters to /etc/inid.d/rc.local but still get the 
boot and error messages at the very slow rate, would like the change as 
early as possible.

Thanks for any help.
Keith