I'm having about a 200ms delay between things that should make noises (like shooting) and hearing the sound.

System info: 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04, pulseaudio.

Log:
[Wed Aug 25 14:58:14 2010] Found driver: "OpenGL Reference GKGL driver". Type 5, Version 88.0. Load @0x08746360
[Wed Aug 25 14:58:14 2010] Instantiate address: 0xf727a530
[Wed Aug 25 14:58:14 2010] Found driver: "Open Sound System driver". Type 1, Version 9.1. Load @0x08747480
[Wed Aug 25 14:58:14 2010] Instantiate address: 0xf7796150
[Wed Aug 25 14:58:14 2010] Found driver: "ALSA driver". Type 1, Version 9.1. Load @0x08747800
[Wed Aug 25 14:58:14 2010] Instantiate address: 0xf77925c0
ALSA initialized: 44100Hz, 16bit stereo, 92ms latency (16 periods x 256 samples)

remove pulseaudio, it's bad.

Pure alsa is much faster and better supported.

Pulseaudio used to be bad. Since upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, I've had no problems with it; VO and other apps worked fine. Without it, certain apps have issues such as multi-second latency or complete inability to produce sound when trying to use audio simultaneously.

I think I actually meant to post this in bugs, but here will do.

Perhaps I am behind on things, but last I knew the Alsa emulation layer for Pulse was poor quality and laggy. This would seem to be a result of that.

Do other apps without Pulse support, such as Quake3 games, work properly?

I had the same issue a few days ago. It was only with VO. It turned out to be a server lag issue. After a while, the lag lessened and so did the sound delay.

The issue appears to have resolved itself with the latest update.