Speech-dispatcher crashing intermittently in Ubuntu 9.10

[John Robinson]

	Hi everyone.  I'm a new Ubuntu user and am using Ubuntu 9.10 at the 
moment.  I am currently having a bit of an issue with Speech-dispatcher 
which appears to crash intermittently.  This of course stops Orca 
working and means I lose speech in Gnome until I reboot.  My 
Speech-dispatcher settings are the default ones i.e. I haven't changed 
any speech-dispatcher configuration files since installing Ubuntu 9.10. 
  Has anyone else had this problem with Speech-dispatcher?  If so, has 
anyone managed to solve it?

I look forward very much to any advice you may have.

Regards,

John Robinson