qole,

Your suggestion worked like a charm for fixing the smbclient issue, however installing blackbox still nuked pulseaudio.

A little scrutiny revealed that installing blackbox was replacing the the symlinks from
libpulsecommon-0.9.21.so -> libpulsecommon-0.9.15.so
and from
libpulse.so.0.12.2 -> libpulse.so.0.8.0
with
libpulsecommon-0.9.21.so -> libpulsecommon-0.9.21.so.real
and
libpulse.so.0.12.2 -> libpulse.so.0.real.

No idea why that would happen, but replacing the symlinks solved the problem. It happened again when I installed audacious, but instead of tracking down the cause I wrote this little script to work around the issue:

Having to run it after installing new packages is small price to pay in the larger scheme.

I'm all set now! Blackbox, tightvncserver running 1920x1080, and crisp audio piping through my headphones!

Thanks for all the help!