Openbox on Ubuntu (14.04) observations and some questions...

I installed Openbox on top ofn Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I'm begiing to think Ubuntu would make a great base for a serious O-buntu flavour

For no other reason than because 'I can' I'm ruing on an Intel stick with 32Gb of space and 2Gb ram with a quad core Atom chip plugged into a TV via HDMI port and this little thing is killing it!

Stable (It's been 9 days so far) and easily offering the 'casual' user the ability to browse the web, read email etc. Even more so with a light-weight D/E... I haven't tried pushing the limits too hard as yet as I'm still feeling my way...

A couple of things I noticed though is the patchy audio. I observed the following; in Openbox sound is only patchy if using Rhythmbox or surprise, VLC. Open audio files (mp3,ogg) in Totem and they play through without a hitch. I haven't got my head around VLC not stepping up yet Another thing was in Openbox and ruing Tint2, if Totem player was minimised to the panel then playback was as choppy as the other players. Restore the window to the desktop and the choppy playback vanished. It was a different story in Unity however, where any player I tried worked flawlessly even when minimised to the side-panel. This seems strange behaviour as only the loaded D/E was different.

Enabling a login sound in both D/E resulted in the playback login sound being cut off only to then play-out as apps were opened or menus searched. Strange.

Anyone here using similar hardware, or thoughts on the above sound issues?