urgent: Ubuntu 9.04 high-speed speech problem

[luke Davis]

Hello

I have recently had to reinstall Ubuntu on my laptop, and went with 9.04.  
Starting to regret it, since I wanted LVM, but the installer doesn't 
include it, but that's neither here nor there.

My urgent usability problem is: orca is starting when I alt-F2 and type 
orca, but it says everything at an incomprehensible high speed, as 
described previously on this list.

I have tried the "touch ~/.pulse_a11y_nostart" solution oft-described on 
these lists, but it had absolutely no effect.

I need this laptop for a job in a few hours--are there any other solutions 
which might be implemented, since the touch option doesn't work?

an "ls .pulse*" gets:

.pulse_a11y_nostart  .pulse-cookie

.pulse:
1f9aa7f71fe9e9c03ed0552a4b2b0d12:default-sink
1f9aa7f71fe9e9c03ed0552a4b2b0d12:default-source
1f9aa7f71fe9e9c03ed0552a4b2b0d12:device-volumes.i486-pc-linux-gnu.gdbm
1f9aa7f71fe9e9c03ed0552a4b2b0d12:runtime
1f9aa7f71fe9e9c03ed0552a4b2b0d12:stream-volumes.i486-pc-linux-gnu.gdbm

Luke