This is strange. All that happens when you do the ioctl is that the parameters for the volume adjustment get set. It doesn't actually touch the audio device at all. Now, changing these parameters could make a pop if there was music playing, but there should no buffers containing music.

I don't know why it's happening.

I will have to try putting a custom init in place on my player and see how much I can duplicate this behaviour. You don't get this behaviour with the standard kernel, right?

Richard.