Fedora :: Sound System In F12 Disappointing

I have recently updated my Laptop from Fedora (core) 5 to Fedora 12 hoping to have a much better operating system in the sense that things work more easily, are more stable, are easy to maintain etc. In nearly every respect I am positively surprised by Fedora 12 (ease of installation, hardware managing, stability, power operations, ...), but I am disappointed how the sound is handled in Fedora 12.
Although some things are easier now (you can just plug in headsets without rebooting the laptop), other things are just handled more or less as it has been in the old version 5 of Fedora:

- When using skype, I sometimes have sound problems (don't hear anything). I need to see what program uses the sound port by scanning through the output of lsof /dev/snd or so, with the need to e.g. shut down firefox, so skype can take over the port.
- This lists also pulseaudio, no idea what this is. Can I kill it? What is this used for?
- Also sometimes, the input source control (in the mixer) is reset to zero by some program, and I have to open the mixer and set it back to maximum
- And when using mplayer, it always adjusts the output source control to maximum, although I have reduced it before.

I really hoped that the sound managing would be much better in Fedora 12, but it is not. Maybe there are ways to improve the sound managing? Or a code that can be updated? Or a different code that just lets you use all the sound-producing applications like in Windows, where you can adjust the volume of multiple sound-producing applications (firefox, skype, mplayer, ...)?