aRts and alsa (again)

Hi folks, some time ago there was a discussion about using aRts and ALSA in parallel in this list. The bottomline seemed to be that, as soon as one uses ALSA as backend for aRts (and/or selects 'autosuspend'), everything should be fine. Maybe I didn't get the point, but for me this doesn't work: As long as artsd is running (with or without autosuspend) all programs using an ALSA driver fail. Only when I terminate artsd, they suddenly work. Since a couple of programs can't use aRts (or - for whatever reason - it sounds horrible) it would be great if there were a posibility to use both, aRts _and_ ALSA (w/o aRts frontend). Any ideas? Cheers, Martin